


I, Zola

by Royal_Ermine



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1920s, Captivity, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Flashbacks, M/M, Memory Loss, Murder Mystery, Mystery, Non-Graphic Violence, Non-Linear Narrative, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-06-18 07:48:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 48,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15481047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Royal_Ermine/pseuds/Royal_Ermine
Summary: A grisly discovery in the headquarters of SHIELD prompts Steve and Bucky to piece together a mystery from HYDRA’s past, revealing the untold story of Dr. Arnim Zola, a broken-hearted scientist who sacrificed everything for the sake of love.Superb  art work created for me by Diamond_Raven





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Diamond_Raven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diamond_Raven/gifts).



> Dedicated in humble gratitude to the wonderful and talented Diamond Raven, a rare genius of the pen, who has done so much to bring Steve, Bucky and Dr. Zola to life in this story. 
> 
> Note on the text  
> This story is set during two timelines: one in the present (post-TWS) and the other in the past (post-TFA). The past timeline includes a canon divergence where Zola was not captured during the train mission. Both timelines concern Bucky and Zola’s shared experiences under HYDRA.

 

_“And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover…I am determined to prove a villain.”_

_― William Shakespeare, Richard III_

 

They’re only human, but superheroes are sometimes obliged to do superhuman things. That includes running towards the piercing shriek of an alarm instead of away from it.

But for several seconds, Steve was placing second in his headlong rush down the stairs to reach the bright red double-doors. He only got there first because his boyfriend pulled up short, once he’d figured out where they were headed.

“What’s up?”

Bucky shook his head fearfully, backing away towards the stairwell.

Only then did it dawn on Steve.

They were at the entrance to the sub-basement; once the concrete bunker where the ‘Winter Soldier’ had been stored during the time when that sadistic animal Alexander Pierce had commanded HYDRA.

It was an unspoken rule that neither of them mentioned the former secret lab in the bowels of SHIELD Headquarters, uncovered only after Pierce’s ignominious death. Both of them had left the conference room when Fury had initiated a discussion of what to do with this additional space now at the organization’s disposal.  They weren’t being deliberately rude to the Colonel by their actions, but any talk of how to exploit this “asset” might have triggered painful memories for the man HYDRA had labelled an ‘asset’ for far too long. 

Later, an email had announced the decision to turn the sub-basement into an underground parking lot. The last Steve had heard, the civilian contractors had come in with their pneumatic drills to gut the place.  He couldn’t have hoped for a more fitting end to that putrid rat hole where they’d mercilessly tortured the love of his life.

The closest either of them ever got to the sub-basement was the gym where they sparred most mornings, five floors above. It was from there that they’d heard the alarm blaring and sprinted off to investigate its source.

Steve’s shoulders relaxed as he finished catching his breath, causing the tepid stripe of sweat spreading down the back of his athletic vest to steadily chill against his skin. And all the while, the claxon’s shrill siren echoed ceaselessly in the cavernous space beyond.

“You don’t have to go in there, Buck.”

“Neither do you. We…we can wait for back-up.” Bucky’s voice was shaky.

Steve hesitated, his hand slackened on one of the door handles, then tightened again. This was absurd. The place was an empty shell, and by the faint vibrations he’d felt in his spine when Bucky had pinned him to the training mat with a triumphant cackle only a few minutes earlier, it seemed likely that work to demolish the internal structure was already in full swing. 

Normally, he wouldn’t have hesitated to just barge in there. He wasn’t afraid of a few ghosts, but beneath the uniform of Captain America beat the heart of a man whose love for Bucky made him hesitate. This was no ordinary door. They were standing on the threshold of a space that connected his boyfriend to a nightmare of pain. If striding in there superhero style would bring all that back again then he’d walk away from it in an instant.

“Bucky, I…”

Abruptly, one of the doors swung open from the inside. A slender Indian workman in green overalls several sizes too big for him cautiously popped his head around the door, took one look at Steve and turned pale.

“Oh, no! Please don’t tell the boss. We really didn’t mean to do it,” he pleaded with a British accent so resonant that Steve instantly thought of Peggy.

“It’s okay. I won’t tell anybody.” The man looked unsure, so Steve flashed a Captain America toothpaste grin at him, just for good measure. “Is everyone all right in there?”

“I think so. We…that is my team and I…” the workman blushed apologetically. “We stumbled into something rather unexpected. One of my men lost his balance and fell against some kind of alarm button when he went off exploring. I warned him not to go in there, but…now we don’t know how to turn it off again. We really don’t want to get into any trouble. Can you…can you help us please?”

It was a perfectly reasonable request anywhere but where they were standing. Beyond those doors lay a world Steve and Bucky tried their best to forget. This man needed their help, and no-one else had arrived to relieve them. It wasn’t all that surprising, it had probably been less than a minute since they'd reached the doors, but for Steve it had felt like an hour. No doubt it had felt even longer for poor Bucky as he lingered nervously by the stairwell.

Bucky huffed out a resigned sigh, staring glumly at the floor. “It’s… it’s okay, Steve. You…you go. I’ll be okay.”

Bucky couldn’t tell a decent lie to save his life. But Steve didn’t have many options. He could stand there impotently or he could help out. But he couldn’t even begin to explain to this complete stranger the concerns that ached in his heart.

“I’ll only be a few minutes, Buck. I promise. Fury’s bound to be down here soon…if Tony doesn’t beat him to it.”

A reference to the mostly friendly rivalry between their team members was never going to lighten the mood, but it elicited an upward tilt of the chin and the knowing grin that Steve had hoped for. He knew Bucky wasn’t happy, or comfortable. But a lifetime of lingering by those doors wouldn’t make those feelings go away. There were but two choices: to continue waiting, or to solve the problem and get out of there as quick as possible.

Steve nodded to Bucky, turned back to the British-Indian man, and followed him in.

He’d been expecting the claxon’s cry to harm his super-hearing, but he hadn’t been prepared for the oppressive heat of the enclosed space, nor the thick swirling concrete dust picked out by the beams of the construction team’s powerful halogen headlights. The half-demolished monolith was a pretty unpleasant working environment, but not exactly a house of horror. Scanning the walls for an alarm reset button, he noted with grim satisfaction that the team had obliterated every trace of the sub-basement’s previous existence.

Well, almost every trace.

“I’m Steve, by the way.” He extended his hand.

The workman shook it heartily. “Taj,” he replied.

“So, where’s this panic button that your team member triggered, Taj?”

“Oh, yes. Right this way, Steve.”

They continued on towards a small group of Indian workers, gathered around a gap in the wall at the far right hand corner of the building.

“Is everything all right?” he asked a tall wiry man with a lump hammer.

“Just trying to clear the rubble a bit,” the man replied, flashing a wide toothy grin.

Taj nodded. “Yes, that’s very good.” He turned back to Steve. “You should fit through there okay, yes?”

“Through there?” Steve pointed at the gap with a look of surprise he wasn’t able to disguise very well.

“Why, yes. That’s where we found the panic button.” He handed Steve an extra-strong flashlight. “It’s okay. I’ll follow you in.”

Steve was about to protest. But he stopped himself at the last moment. He had one mission, and that was to turn off the alarm and get himself and Bucky out of there, not to stagger around in some cramped hell-hole. If Taj could help him locate and disable the source of that noise, then he’d happily welcome the extra company.

Squeezing through the space first, and glad to be away from the insistent throbbing in his ears, he breathed in a lungful of sour stale air. Clearly this area of the sub-basement hadn’t seen the light of day in many years. He spun the flashlight around to reveal a modest 12 foot square office, with what appeared to be the tall outline of a decaying bookcase in one corner, and a collapsed desk pushed up against the far wall, crushing the remains of a swivel chair. Everything was coated with a fine layer of dust, but not the choking concrete dust from outside. This was the dust accumulated from many decades of deterioration and decay.

A sudden touch to the elbow almost made him jump.

“The button’s right there, Steve,” whispered Taj, directing the beam of his flashlight to a space just to the side of the collapsed desk.

The button had been placed carefully behind glass. It looked like the kind of panic button designed to trigger an alarm that would summon help. And it had worked.

Taj’s work colleague must have triggered it by stumbling over the collapsed furniture and falling against the glass. It was a one-way system, designed so it couldn’t be easily silenced. There was no way he could disable the alarm from there.

Steve approached the button. He tried to move cautiously, but the lack of light wasn’t in his favor. As if to illustrate how easy it was to trip over, he quickly lost his footing in the jumble of broken legs from the collapsed desk, planting one giant boot through its surface.

Not exactly his finest hour.

Taj maintained a respectful silence, training his flashlight on Steve, as he extricated himself from the hole he’d just made, and cautiously attempted to squeeze himself beneath the lopsided structure.

“What are you looking for, Steve?”

“There might be another panic button under the desk. If I can find the wire that connects it to the one on the wall, then I might be able to…”

His eyes caught sight of an uneven shape just beyond his reach that had been squashed almost flat by the desk. His flashlight revealed it to be the remains of a metal wastepaper basket, rusted where it lay crushed against the floor.

Just poking out of a rusted hole was a thin sliver of fine brown celluloid tape.

Beyond that room, the faint echo of the security alarm suddenly ceased. Steve lay still for a moment, listening intently and waiting to hear if the alarm would resume. After a minute, nothing had changed, so he prepared himself to get out from underneath the desk, but he couldn’t keep his eyes away from his unexpected discovery. Steve didn’t know why it had caught his attention, but he decided to give in to his curiosity. Stretching his arm out as far as he could, he looped a finger around the strand of tape, and pulled towards him very gently. With a faint rattling sound, a tiny shattered plasticized object surrounded by a tangle of tape emerged. He inched his arm across the floor to edge it even closer.

 Slowly; painfully slowly, the little broken thing came into the range of his grasp, and…

“Well, if isn’t Captain America!” A voice boomed directly above him. “What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?”

Steve half stood-up, bumping his head on the desk. “Damnit! Sam?”

“Present and correct, sir,” his wisecracking teammate said, throwing him a sarcastic salute with one hand and shining a second flashlight at an embarrassed Steve as  he emerged sheepishly from beneath the desk, the object nestled in the palm of his hand.

“Sam Wilson, I swear to God…”

“You swear to God, what? I came to rescue you, buddy.”

“Rescue me from what? Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“Busy doing what?”

“Disabling the alarm,” Steve lied, as he tightened his grip around the prize.

“Already done.  Tony got JARVIS to cut the power to all the sirens in this area when we couldn’t find a master switch for the sub-basement. But couldn’t you hear that we’d shut it off?”

Steve half-shrugged.

“Oh, guess you can’t in this place, huh?  Strange, I thought your super hearing was way better than that!”

“I’ve had some serious stuff to deal with,” deadpanned Steve, refusing to rise to his friend’s goading “Did you find Bucky?”

“Yeah,” Sam’s jocular tone of voice turned serious. “Nat took him upstairs. He’s real upset. You should have waited for us, Steve.”

“Taj asked for my help.”

The British-Indian man nodded his ready confirmation.

“Well, your mission’s accomplished. Come on, let’s get you out of here and back upstairs to Bucky.”

“That’s fine by me. I’ve had just about enough of this place,” Steve said, pausing momentarily to slip the mystery object into the safety of his pocket.

He picked his way through the collapsed furniture more carefully, not wanting to make a fool of himself in front of an audience for a second time. But he needn’t have worried. Taj had disappeared back through the hole and Sam was staring transfixed at the corner of the room nearest to what would once have been the office door, his flashlight trained on the floor.

“Well, would you take a look at that?”

Steve followed the sweep of Sam’s flashlight beam. A broad coppery stain stretched out from the collapsed desk up to the doorframe, the heavy metal door suspended on a single hinge, and beyond it, only halting where it encountered the false wall that had screened the entire room from prying eyes right up until that morning.

“Doesn’t take a genius to work out what this is,” Sam noted.

“Yeah, there’s a real spray of it,” Steve agreed. “But whose blood is it?”

“Beats me, buddy. But I think we need to get Tony down to take a look at…”

“Steve, Steve! Help! Come quickly!”

The gap in the wall had been widened further, and it only took a few moments for Steve and Sam to rush out into the empty space, blinking in the sudden bright light of the halogen beams. To the left of them, Taj’s wiry colleague had ceased demolition duties and now stood staring at his handiwork in horror.

It was obvious why he’d stopped.

His hammer had neatly pierced the dome of a human skull, entombed deep within the wall. The skeletal remains of the body’s sternum and ribs had spilled out of the breach in an untidy heap.

“It’s okay, guys,” Steve reassured the panicked workmen, as best he could, “Try not to get yourselves too upset over this. It’s okay. You’ll be just fine. We’ll…we’ll all be just fine.”

The skeleton was a mystery, but one thing was certain, Taj’s traumatized construction team had become the latest casualties of HYDRA. The specter of that cursed organization cast its forbidding shadow over SHIELD once more.

Even after all these years, it seemed, HYDRA had yet to give up its dead.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boys discover the identity of the body in the wall, but the revelation raises more questions than it answers...

Bucky had opted to stay away from the hurried briefing squeezed into SHIELD’s boardroom, for understandable reasons. But on the elevator ride back up to their shared apartment, Steve couldn’t decide how much he should say.

He needn’t have worried. Bucky had already made that decision for him.

“Out with it, Rogers,” he grunted. “All of it. I ain’t gonna be babied.”

As Steve rushed through the door, he noticed Nat was sitting beside Bucky on one of the twin cream leather couches. From the depleted box of tissues on their glass-topped teak coffee table, Steve surmised a whole lot of comforting had been going on since he was away. And yet Bucky’s first words to Steve revealed something about the sharp logic of Bucky’s mind.  It was clear he’d moved past his tears and was now searching for answers. Steve perched nervously on the edge of the couch opposite, trying to interpret body language. Nat still had one arm draped over Bucky’s shoulders, and Steve could see the tiny adjustment in posture as Bucky leaned further against her. Steve felt a touch envious, but at the same time, he was immensely grateful for Nat’s calm presence. Any attempt to shield Bucky from the truth would have been purposeless and positively insulting bearing in mind how many times HYDRA must have lied to him.

And for the time being, he was sitting in just the right place for candor. Candor required eye contact.

“The workmen found a false wall. Beyond it was a room, an old office that had been sealed up for years. Me and Sam…well…” He cast his eyes down to the coffee table.

“You and Sam what?” Bucky pressed.

“We…we found a lot of old bloodstains and some skeletal remains buried in the wall.”

“Wait. HYDRA actually _murdered_ somebody down there?” Nat queried.

“We don’t know that yet. But at the moment, SHIELD’s treating it as a crime scene.”

“Did Fury say he’s calling in the cops?” she asked. “I know he hates doing that, but for something like this, he won’t have much of a choice.”

“Fury claims to know people in high places,” Steve said. “He’s hoping to convince them to let SHIELD carry out its own internal investigation first, but – until that’s been established – any further exploration of the sub-basement has been suspended. SHIELD got clearance to remove the remains the workmen already found for forensic analysis, but nothing else gets touched. The cops have posted a double guard just to make sure.”

Bucky’s stony silence spoke volumes. It triggered an immediate response from Nat.

“Well, I think it’s about time I left you two to digest this news together,” she said, gently. Bucky looked up at her with a shy smile of gratitude.

“You want me to let you know when there are any updates?” she continued.

“Please,” Steve said. “I don’t think I could face Tony or Fury right now. They’ve both as sensitive as concrete.”

His mind flashed back to the thick concrete dust in the sub-basement. He was still coated with it, darkened to tarry streaks on his gym gear where the sweat had dried. Why hadn’t he thought to take a shower after the briefing?

Nat nodded. “I’ll tell Tony to make sure JARVIS lets no-one in here without your express permission.”

Steve sighed heavily. “Thanks, Nat. I owe you one.”

Bucky stared blankly at the floor for several minutes after that. Steve rehearsed words in his mind that died before they ever reached his tongue.  He almost flinched at the anguish in his boyfriend’s voice when at last he spoke.

“What…was it like in there?” Bucky asked, with a shudder.

“Empty mostly. I…almost thought HYDRA’s memory had been cleared out of the place, until we found the room.”

“You said it was an…an office, right?”

“Yeah, I guess. There was the wreckage of a desk, a chair, a bookcase, all rotted away. Even a rusted old wastepaper basket.”

Steve suddenly remembered what he’d found in that wastepaper basket.

Thank goodness he hadn’t taken a shower after all. In that brisk efficiency characteristic of life in SHIELD headquarters, his clothes would have been laundered automatically.

He dug into the pocket of his sweatpants and gently fished out the little smashed object, carefully holding it out in the palm of his hand.

Bucky furrowed his brow. “What in the world is that?”

“Something I found while I was down there. I dunno what it is. I was kinda hoping you could tell me?”

“Steve, I have no real memories of the sub-basement,” Bucky lamented. “Just an endless cycle of violence and pain.”

Steve winced. ”I’m sorry. I should have known you wouldn’t have recognized it. It just felt right to give you the chance to try and identify it before I hand it over to Tony for analysis.”

“Hold on. You’re...gonna give it to _Stark_?”

“Well, yeah,” Steve shrugged. “He’ll be able to figure out what it is and how to fix it.”

“But it came from the sub-basement. It might be a part of my life back then.”

“Exactly. It came from the sub-basement; from the crime scene. That means that it’s evidence. I can’t withhold evidence, Buck.”

“Technically, it’s not evidence, at least not until there’s an investigation. You said yourself that the investigation’s suspended.”

“And technically nothing gets removed from the crime scene but the skeleton, so _technically_ I have to declare this.”

“But you _can’t_ give it to Stark,” Bucky insisted. “You just can’t. What if it’s about me? I don’t trust Stark with confidential stuff, and I know deep down you don’t either. I don’t want him messing around with it.”

“Messing around with what? We don’t even know what it is.”

“Can’t you use the internet thing you keep telling me about to find that out?”

Steve’s skepticism soured his face. “I dunno, Buck. It’s…well, it’s wrong. It’s very wrong. Keeping evidence from Tony, I mean. We could get in a whole lot of trouble.”

Bucky crossed his right arm. The effect was somewhat spoiled by his lack of a left one, but his expression of indignation was unmistakable.

“Okay, okay I…I guess I could check, but I gotta take a shower first, okay?”

Bucky managed a curt nod.

Steve laid the object on the coffee table and rose to his feet, figuring it was safe leaving Bucky to let all that sink in. That was until he glanced back at him from the door to the bathroom. Bucky was staring at the coffee table, chewing on his lip and looking altogether less confident than he had a few moments ago.

Steve returned and slid back beside Bucky. He was surprised when Bucky made an instant grab for his hand.

“Buck?”

“I’m…I’m sorry Stevie.” He shuddered, “I’m just…I…”

Steve clasped Bucky’s hand between his own, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

“I…just didn’t think it would ever be over when I was down there in that living hell. When I was free, I never really believed it. Deep down, I’d always been scared HYDRA would return to claim me someday…and though I know they’re gone for good…I’m scared all those memories are gonna come and drag me back to hell all over again.”

Steve pulled Bucky into a tight embrace, his heart aching from the fear in his boyfriend’s voice. “That ain’t gonna happen Buck, I promise. We got each other now. That skeleton is old, real old. It’s part of the past HYDRA couldn’t be bothered to bury properly. It spooked the workmen who uncovered it, but it can’t hurt you. It’s not you trapped in that wall.”

“But Steve, don’t you see? It could have been,” insisted Bucky. “What if they’d grown tired of me, murdered me and buried _me_ in that wall? That…” his voice died down again. “That…could have been me.”

Steve gently carded his fingers through Bucky’s soft hair. Invoking logic wasn’t going to help. Clearly the body they’d found wasn’t that of James Buchanan Barnes, but dismissing Bucky’s fears denied the unquestionable truth; that one of HYDRA’s many victims had literally resurfaced right under their noses. The identity of the body was unknown, but its effect was plain enough, reminding Bucky of how perilous life had been under the thumb of Alexander Pierce and HYDRA.

“I…don’t want to be alone,” Bucky whispered in his ear. “Can I please come join you, Stevie?”

In the past, such a question would have been an invitation to foreplay, or even full-on sex right there in the shower cubicle. But Steve knew better. Bucky needed comfort; the kind of comfort only skin-to-skin contact could provide.

“Whatever you want, sweetheart,” Steve whispered back.

 

-*-

 

With a surgical precision that belied the loss of an arm, Bucky carefully unwrapped the brown celluloid tape twisted around the mystery object one-handed. Steve could probably have done the job more efficiently, yet despite Bucky’s still soggy shower-hair; his boyfriend seemed entirely fixated on the task, as if this was some precious relic he’d been entrusted to protect. Over an hour passed before all the constituent parts were visible. The tape had originally been inside the object, looped into two spools placed adjacent to each other inside a transparent plasticized casing, part of which had been shattered by a heavy weight, perhaps the weight of the desk, or – perhaps – somebody’s boot. Steve tried not to dwell too much on the strong possibility that it might have been _his_ boot.

“I remember something kinda like this,” Steve said. “The top brass had spools of tape attached to a machine in wartime France to record conversations using a microphone. But the whole setup was much, much bigger; almost the size of that coffee table.”

“So what would a tiny little tape like this have been used for?” Bucky asked.

Steve got off the sofa and started jabbing at the computer keyboard on the workstation in the corner with a single finger.

“Internet?” Bucky queried.

“So helpful,” Steve completed. “I just need to type in the right words. JARVIS could help, I guess.”

“No! Absolutely not. It might get back to Stark.”

“Well, you do have a point there,” Steve conceded. “I’ll never get used to the way modern technology monitors everything you do and then just interrupts…”

“Excuse me, sir,” JARVIS’ voice smoothed in, right on cue. “You have a call from Ms Romanov. She asks if it is convenient for her to speak to you right now.”

Bucky nodded an assent.

“Sure,” Steve said.

The unmistakable sound of the hands-free telephone crackled to life.

“Steve?”

“Hey, Nat. What can we do for you?”

“Are you guys okay?”

Steve glanced at Bucky “I…guess so. What’s up?”

“Are you sitting down?”

“Bucky’s on the couch. I’m standing…” He was about to say “at the computer”, but stopped himself just in time.

“Well you might want to go join Bucky, if you’re up to hearing this.”

“Hearing what?” Bucky said, as Steve tucked himself in close beside his boyfriend.

“After getting the go-ahead from the police department, Tony ran some tests on the blood samples in the room. The DNA was pretty degraded after all that time, but added to the dental records of the skull, we got a positive match. They belonged to the same individual.”

“Okay,” Bucky said, his jaw set firm. “So, who was it?”

Nat’s pause before answering was palpable. Bucky’s shoulder muscles visibly tensed.

“Did I know them?” he asked, warily.

Nat cleared her throat before replying. “I er…guess you could say that, Bucky. It was the body of… of Dr. Arnim Zola.”

“Zola?” the boys exclaimed, pretty much simultaneously. 

“Yeah.”

Steve gave a heavy sigh. “When Pierce tried to kill me with that missile strike on the old base, at least I had the satisfaction of knowing he’d destroyed Zola instead. I never thought I’d have to speak about that heartless scientist again.”

“Pierce might have destroyed the computer that housed Zola’s mind,” Nat agreed. “But you gotta remember that Zola must have ditched his body long ago. Once he’d had transferred his mind to that computer system, HYDRA would then have been left with the problem of what to do with his physical remains. Burying the skeleton in a wall might seem a bit like overkill, but Tony figures this was HYDRA’s way of sweeping Zola under the nearest rug.”

Steve’s expression turned doubtful. “Hmm…I dunno. That sounds kinda…”

He stopped short, and turned to face Bucky, who had begun to shudder uncontrollably. His eyes stared vacantly into space and his nostrils flared on each increasingly shallow breath.

“Listen, I really gotta go, Nat. Let me know when you hear anything else, okay?”

“Okay, Steve. No pro…”

Steve hung up.

“Bucky? Bucky, sweetheart? Can you hear me?”

Bucky swallowed thickly.

“Look into my eyes, huh? Can you….can you look into my eyes?”

He placed his hand over his boyfriend’s. Bucky instantly pulled away as if he’d been stung.

Steve had seen this before. Bucky was regressing; his damaged memories had gouged a deep scratch into the record of his conscious mind, pitching him back to those dark days when he wasn’t Bucky anymore, just the ‘asset’.

“Oh, God. Buck…Buck…please stay with me?”

Bucky’s eyelids fluttered, trying to keep focused on the present.

“Bucky, you’re here right now, with me; with your Stevie.  We’re in our living quarters sitting together on the couch; can you smell the leather couch? Can…can you see my face?”

He didn’t want to touch Bucky again for fear of another violent reaction; just watching him struggle with his hateful past was violent enough. ‘A curse on you, Zola’, he thought to himself.

There was no way of rushing things. Bucky’s breathing steadily levelled off, the shallow panting giving way to deep gasping breaths.  Steve knew from painful experience that major flashbacks like this typically tired Bucky out so much that he needed a restorative nap, so Steve carefully lifted his boyfriend’s legs up on the couch, slipping a cushion under his head and smoothing the spare comforter from the bedroom closet over his body.

 

-*-

 

A couple of hours later, Bucky blinked awake. The first thing in his eye line was the tiny tape, still resting on the coffee table. He’d treated it so carefully before. Now he was seized by the sudden urge to smash what was left of it to smithereens. The holy relic turned out to be a false idol; most likely the possession of Dr. Arnim Zola, the monster who had turned him from a man into an unthinking killing machine. It deserved to go to hell, just like its owner.

“You wanna know what it is?”

Bucky glanced up. He didn’t know how long Steve had been watching him from the computer, but he could make a good guess. Steve had told him a few times that he liked to watch Bucky sleeping, just so grateful that fate had finally brought them together again. On hearing that, Bucky had called him a punk, and Steve had called him a jerk, using the same friendly banter that they’d had since the 30s, but Bucky had felt immensely touched by Steve’s confession nonetheless.

“Gee, I dunno, Rogers. Do I _really_ wanna know what it is?”  Bucky asked warily, nodding in the direction of the object on the coffee table.

“It’s…it’s not that important, Buck. I won’t tell you if you’d rather not…”

“Oh, relax will ya?” Bucky groaned. “I was the one that asked you to find out what it was, wasn’t I?”

“I guess. I just don’t want you to be upset.”

“I’d have been a lot more upset if you’d just handed it over to Stark. So?”

“It’s a Dictaphone audiocassette,” Steve said, angling the monitor towards Bucky.

Bucky swung his legs back onto the floor and rose cautiously to his feet, his head still pounding insistently from the after effects of the flashback. Sure enough, the screen displayed an object that looked very much like the one on the coffee table. Except that their cassette had most of its celluloid tape disemboweled and laid out in a loopy twisted mess.

“You were right about it being a recording device, then?”

“I guess so. Today it’s all digital. They don’t use tape at all anymore, mostly because the insides can get pulled out, just like that one.” He nodded to the damaged tape.

Bucky blinked in pain from the flickering screen.

“How are you feeling now, sweetheart?”

“Sore.”

“Your head?”

“That…and the thoughts inside of it.”

Steve nodded.

“I can’t believe I got myself upset over something that turned out to be that bastard Zola,” Bucky grumbled.

“You think he deserved it?”

“To be buried in a wall? Absolutely. He didn’t deserve a Christian burial, that’s for damn sure,” Bucky swallowed hard. “But…”

“But?”

Bucky scratched the back of his neck. “Something’s not right. Something’s out of place here.”

 

-*-

Steve had always known this about Bucky. Ever since they were children, he’d noticed that, while reacting angrily at first, Bucky could always be relied on to rapidly rethink any setback and then act calmly and rationally. He had an enquiring mind. If he hadn’t been forced to quit school so young and work at the docks, if he hadn’t been forced into war and into a fight he hadn’t started, he would have had all the makings of a damn fine scientist.

“So, what’s out of place, Buck?”

Bucky worked his way back to the sofa to escape the glowing monitor, Steve joining him.

“There were bloodstains on the floor, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Steve said, putting his arm around Bucky’s shoulders in the same way Nat had done. Yet Bucky snuggled himself in Steve’s side way more intimately than he had with Nat, and Steve couldn’t quite keep his triumphant smile to himself.

“But ask yourself this,” Bucky said. “If a scientist like Zola had methodically planned to transfer his mind into a computer, what part of that procedure would have involved him bleeding all over the floor?”

“And it wasn’t some little paper cut either. Sam and I saw a bloodstain that went from the desk to the doorframe. He’d have had to be bleeding his life away to leave a trail as wide as that.”

“So either Zola’s method of mind transfer was far messier than we could possibly imagine, or he didn’t want it to happen, and there was a violent struggle,” Bucky concluded.

Steve shook his head sadly. “I think you’re reading too much into this, Buck. I guess the blood wouldn’t have been there if he’d meekly given his mind up to HYDRA, but they could have just forced him against his will and killed him after. It doesn’t follow there was any kind of a struggle.”

“If HYDRA had just wanted him dead,” Bucky explained, “They’d have been able to overpower him in that office with no difficulty. They were professional killers. I should know, I was one of them. They could have done it cleanly, or at least a damn sight more cleanly than that.”

“But Zola was their top scientist. If what you say is true, then why would he even want to resist them, and why would they want to kill him so violently?”

“Two possibilities,” Bucky said. “Either he stopped being useful…”

“…In which case they’d have probably killed him cleanly like you said,” Steve jumped in.

“Or,” Bucky continued. “He did something so terrible, they wanted to see him suffer.”

“He betrayed them?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Bucky admitted. “But I think we need to find out.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all SO much for your positive comments, guys. I wasn't sure how this fic would be received and so I'm thrilled to know that you're enjoying this unusual Stucky murder mystery so far. I can't tell you what happens in the future, but I can promise lots more twists and turns for you and the boys to uncover in the next thrilling instalment...


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another fragment from the mystery is revealed, and Bucky gets a sign...

“Are you absolutely sure this is the place?”

Bucky’s tell-tale tilt of the head said it all. If it weren’t for those sunglasses, Steve would have seen his eyes roll.

“It kinda stands out from the rest of the shop fronts, don’t ya think, Stevie?”

The ‘Bollywood spectacular’ store squeezed into an unprepossessing gap on the corner of 74th Street didn’t look very spectacular, but the garish pea-green Ganesh statue was unmistakable. The ‘Bollywood & music’ store they’d passed along on that same street, the heart of the Little India district of Queens, was much grander, but it nonetheless lacked the livid shade of Hindu deity they’d been advised to seek out.

“Can we take off these ridiculous disguises now?”

Steve hesitated at Bucky’s request, reluctantly removing his reflective aviators, but toying with them in his hands. “If anyone recognizes us here…”

“They’ll do what?” Bucky huffed. “Captain America’s never been in a Bollywood Movie. They ain’t gonna pester you for an autograph, Stevie.”

Steve instantly regretted his decision to lose the shades the moment he parted the ruby-glass bead curtains of the claustrophobic little store, packed floor to ceiling with every conceivable shape and size of audio-visual recording. Every spare space - and there was precious little of that - was plastered with overlapping posters depicting the trysts of romantic couples, against the backdrop of spectacularly dressed dancers in exotic locales. His head spun from the kaleidoscope of psychedelic colors, together with an overpowering scent of patchouli incense. Somewhere, behind the miniature booth-like counter, a feeble little speaker relayed the lilting melody of a Hindi love song.

Feeling a solid presence beside him, he instinctively reached for Bucky’s willing hand, and sighed with relief when he found it.

“Steve!” another voice called out.

Steve whipped round. The face of the figure edging through the bead curtains had been partly obscured by the tall cardboard box in his arms until he let it drop, but he was pretty sure he recognized the British accent.

“Taj?”

“Well remembered,” Taj said, with a smile.

“I could say the same thing.”

“Well I’d not forget your name, given all we all went through.”

Bucky flashed the kind ‘charming gentleman’ smile that Steve knew of old. It was unsurprising that he couldn’t remember the workman from the sub-basement, given the circumstances. His grip on Steve’s hand tightened.

 It was only then that Steve remembered he was still holding onto Bucky’s hand.

“Oh, I’m sorry, where are my manners? Taj, this is my boyfriend, Bucky. Buck, this is Taj.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Bucky offered his hand once Steve had released it.

“The pleasure is all mine,” Taj said, grasping Bucky’s hand in a firm shake.

Understandably enough, Taj hadn’t remembered the identity of the figure standing several feet away from Steve in the sub-basement either.

“Steve helped calm me and my work crew when we had a dreadful experience a couple of days back, so it’s good to know that he has someone to go home to that can do the same for him.”

Bucky bit back a bitter laugh, recalling how the truth had been the exact opposite.

Steve noticed the flinch, and felt for his boyfriend’s hand again.

“So, uhm, Steve,” Taj said. “Would you like to show me what you’ve brought for me today?”

Steve gaped at him. “How do you know we brought something?”

“You called ahead, didn’t you?”

“I did, but I spoke to a man called Reyanish.”

“My cousin,” Taj clarified. “It’s his name on the store front. He probably told you to look out for the green Ganesh?”

“Yes, that’s right! So, you work here too?”

“Only when he needs a favor. I help him with his job, and he helps me with mine. Of course, you’ve met him in that capacity already. You remember the tall man with the hammer?”

“How could I forget? That was Reyanish?”

Taj nodded. “He was greatly disturbed by what happened so he’s spending more time with his family. Work on your sub-basement has been suspended until they’ve investigated the uhm… unfortunate situation.”

“It’s okay,” Bucky said. “Steve’s told me about what you found.”

“Oh,” Taj turned to Bucky with a smile. “That’s a great relief. I wasn’t sure how much I could say.”

“So you’re helping him out until SHIELD gives you the go-ahead to continue the demolition work?” Bucky asked.

“It’s the least I can do,” Taj said. “He’s been on edge ever since he unearthed that skeleton and I feel partly responsible for asking him to help me on the project. This way at least our family can put food on the table.”

Steve considered that for a moment. How very like SHIELD to wring their hands over the details of investigating the body in the sub-basement, yet not give a moment’s thought to the ‘little people’ inconvenienced by it all. Perhaps he could help, if this was a task Taj could complete.

“So, this is what we brought for you,” Steve said, digging into his pocket and holding out the broken tape.

“Exactly as you described it to Reyanish. You sir, are the proud owner of a vintage Dictaphone cassette tape, or at least what’s left of one.”

“Is it something you could repair for us?”

Taj nodded. “For many years the older generation preferred their music from audio-cassette tapes, but they often got worn out, so we learned how to repair the tapes as well as selling them.”

Steve smiled wryly to himself. He’d only just described the advanced recording equipment he’d seen in France to Bucky. Now it seemed even its miniaturized successor had become obsolete. As if to confirm it, Taj continued:

“Of course, the days of audio cassette tapes are long gone but my memory of how they worked is still fresh in my mind.”

“So, what do you think can you do?” Bucky asked.

“I’ll see if I can wind the tape back up again with a pair of tweezers and then transfer the spools into an undamaged casing. I picked up some blank Dictaphone cassettes and an old Dictaphone machine from the street market this morning for a few dollars, so I’ll see if we can bring this old tape back to life for you.”

“What, now?”

“No time like the present, Steve. Besides you said it was urgent and that you couldn’t leave the tape with me.”

“That’s great,” Steve grinned. “You’re a lifesaver, Taj.”

“And you’re a hero, Steve. I don’t know what me and the rest of the team would have done without you.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Just don’t ask him for an autograph,” he muttered under his breath, just loud enough for Steve to hear.

Taj produced a little red cotton pouch from behind the counter, unfurling it to reveal an assortment of tiny metal screwdrivers, probes and similar tools. “I haven’t used these in years,” he said. “Let’s hope I still remember what goes where.”

Steve and Bucky watched in fascination as Taj began his intricate surgery by methodically untangling and rewinding the tape back into the spools.

“It’s a fiddly job,” Taj admitted. “But patience is a virtue.”

“Is the tape looking okay?” Steve asked.

“It’s a bit of a mixed picture,” Taj admitted. “Most of it looks fine, but there’s a length just here…” he tapped at the counter beside a particular section of brown celluloid “…that looks as if it’s been badly stretched. Did someone deliberately pull this tape out of its cassette?”

“That’s possible,” Steve confirmed, guardedly.

“The tricky thing is…” Taj continued “…if the tape gets too stretched, it might lose its structural integrity in the machine when being replayed and either blank out the data, or break…or both of course,” he added, as an afterthought.

Steve swallowed hard at that, but it was a chance they were just going to have to take.

“Okay, let’s see if I can transplant these spools into a fresh cassette now,” Taj continued, carefully placing a blank transparent sleeve onto the counter. “Reyanish would have brought me in to do this even if he’d been working today. His hands are too big for tasks of this nature. Besides, he’s well known for being clumsy,” he added with a wry smile.

“Not the best person to put in charge of a lump hammer then,” Steve said, returning Taj’s grin.

“That’s true. In a sub-basement, you need to be very careful not to knock down anything that holds up the building, but I had a copy of the original blueprint so I spotted the false wall and let him loose on that. What I didn’t know then was that it was blocking off the walls of another room.”

Bucky’s interest piqued. “That seems strange.”

“The whole thing’s strange,” Taj agreed, pausing to gently lift the old spools into blank cassette housing.  “The false wall made the room disappear all right, but who’d go to all the trouble of building that? And who’d want to shove a body inside it, just ready to pop out like a jack-in-the-box and give us all a fright?  What with Reyanish blundering about in the dark setting off alarms, for a split second I thought it was all a prank and you were going to leap out and tell me I was on ‘candid camera’ or something.”

Steve nodded. Looked at from that angle, the whole thing seemed more like a scene out of a cheesy horror movie than the work of HYDRA. He’d never really bought into Tony’s opinion that this was HYDRA’s way of ‘sweeping Zola under the nearest rug’ anyhow. Surely an organization of their ingenuity could have easily smuggled that body out of the sub-basement if they’d wanted to? There had to be another reason why they’d chosen to dispose of Zola so theatrically.

“Where there’s a prank, there’s usually a prankster,” Bucky mused. “I’d imagine whoever did that was very powerful, but also very childish.”

“Wouldn’t have been much of a joke for whoever we found though,” said Taj. “In the Hindu religion, we have special prayers and rituals to honor our dead. Burying someone in a wall would be the ultimate indignity.”

Steve thought back to his own Catholic upbringing; and to his own mother’s funeral. Bucky had given him the strength he needed to get through that day, but deep down, Steve also had the comfort of knowing that his Ma was buried in consecrated ground; so she’d be in heaven looking down on them both.  Zola had no such prospects. As Bucky had rightly pointed out, this was no Christian burial.

 “Okay, well, we’re done,” Taj smiled, withdrawing his miniature screwdriver from the tape with a flourish. “I have the Dictaphone right here. Do you want to test it?”

“Thanks, but we really need to listen to this back home,” Steve said.

“Well, if the sound begins to fail, that’ll probably be in the places where the tape’s been damaged. It might be better if you tried not to stop and start playing it too much at those particular points, or the force of the mechanism might snap the tape completely.”

“And if it does snap?” Bucky asked.

“Then that’s it, I’m afraid,” Taj shrugged.

“Thanks for the advice,” Steve said. “How much do we owe you?”

Taj cast his mind back to the task. “It only took me ten minutes, and half an hour’s hunt around the market this morning for the kind of equipment that most people would have tossed in the trash years ago. I couldn’t possibly charge you more than thirty dollars.”

Steve and Bucky both opened their wallets simultaneously, handing Taj a fifty each.

 “Keep the change,” Bucky said.

“But…but I couldn’t possibly…”

“Tell Reyanish to take care of himself,” Steve smiled as he and Bucky made their exit from the ‘Bollywood spectacular’.

 

-*-

 

Bucky eyed the Dictaphone on the coffee table warily. Steve wished he could have said something reassuring, but words failed him. The throaty roar of the Harley-Davidson, and Bucky’s comforting presence against his back, didn’t deflect even his own fears on the ride home. The broken tape was a problem, but now it was fixed and ready to play, the problem was many times greater.

If it turned out to be nothing, a shopping list or something like that, then it would be disappointing.

If turned out to be blank or so badly damaged as to be inaudible, then it would be frustrating.

But if it turned out to actually be significant, then how could he support his anxious boyfriend through the distress of hearing it?

At least he finally appreciated the merit of taking Bucky’s advice not to simply hand the tape over to Tony. Would they have been comfortable listening to this recording in the presence of a comparative stranger?

That was assuming Bucky was ever going to listen to it in the first place. He looked like he was ready to bolt out of the apartment at any moment.

Steve was on the opposite couch to Bucky, giving him his space. He wasn’t sure that was the best choice either, but Bucky looked so jumpy, he didn’t want to spook him.

“You…don’t have to do anything with it. You know that, Buck?”

Bucky nodded, clearing his throat.

“I’m split right down the middle, Stevie,” he rasped. “I don’t want to know, but I need to know.”

“We can always wait. There’s no rush.”

“But then it’ll just hang over me, filling everything with fear. I can’t let Zola do that to me. I just need…I dunno…”

“A sign?” Steve suggested.

Bucky snorted at that.  “If only. Life’s rarely so…”

“Excuse me, sir,” JARVIS interrupted.

“JARVIS, damnit!” Steve growled. “I left strict instructions that we weren’t to be disturbed.”

“I know sir, I’m sorry,” continued the disembodied voice. “But you left the option open to receive messages from Ms Romanov.”

Bucky waved away Steve’s angry expression. “Take it, Steve. A short break from this tension might just help me to decide.”

Steve thought about that for a moment, and then turned his frown into a bashful smile. “You want some company while you do that, Buck?”

“I thought you’d never ask. I’m not made of glass y’know, Stevie.”

Grinning from ear to ear, Steve swapped couches, putting his arm round Bucky’s shoulders, the brunet snuggling gratefully into his side.

“So, Nat,” said Steve brightly, hearing the faint crackle of the hands-free telephone. “What can we do for you?”

“I’ve got an important update. I thought you’d want to know, guys.”

Her voice sounded carefully modulated, betraying nothing. Bucky’s expression turned fearful.

“Well?” Steve prompted.

“It’s about the body. We’ve established the cause of death.”

“Really? At the briefing, I remember Fury saying that examining an old skeleton probably wouldn’t give us any clues at all.”

“Then he was right. Apart from the skull those workmen smashed in, there was no damage or signs of old injury to the rest of the bones. But when Tony finished piecing that skull back together, he noticed two small fragments were missing. The police insisted on tagging along to make sure he didn’t disturb the crime scene any further, but he got given permission to retrieve them, and…well…he got a whole lot more than he bargained for.”

“Well, don’t leave us in suspense,” Steve said.

“He found a bullet hole in one of the fragments. Analysis showed it came from a .45 caliber ACP cartridge.”

“Automatic Colt Pistol? That’s very precise. How did he know that?”

“Because he found the spent round while combing for the bone fragments in the rubble. And that’s not all. He found the gun it almost certainly came from.”

“So they killed him and then dumped the murder weapon with the body?”

“If it even was murder. The bullet hole suggests Zola was shot in the back of the head. It’s difficult to tell from the angle whether he was executed or simply shot himself in the mouth. The bone is so degraded even JARVIS can’t calculate if the bullet passed through the skull from the inside or the outside.”

“So, you know what killed him, but not how or why.”

“Exactly; Tony’s furious. He thought finding the missing piece would solve the puzzle and get the cops out of SHIELD for good. But since the pieces don’t fit together, he’s done the opposite. The investigation’s delayed indefinitely.”

Steve grunted an acknowledgement before asking “So, what can you tell us about this gun Tony found?”

“The cops impounded it as evidence of course.” Nat said. “But Tony noted two bullets had been fired from the clip, and they agreed to us taking a photograph for our own records. However, he thinks it’ll be pretty much impossible to identify with it being a standard issue model.”

“For HYDRA?”

“No, for the U.S. Military. It’s a Colt M1911A1 regulation issue pistol. Tony’s checked the databases, and it almost certainly dates from the Second World War. Thousands of them were made for the infantry back then. Sending the picture now.”

“Thanks, Nat.”

JARVIS displayed a rotating 3D image of a black-barreled semi-automatic pistol, complete with its brown diamond-patterned grip. The corners of Steve’s mouth twitched upwards as he recognized an old friend. He’d carried one of them; so had Bucky. But then, so had practically every US soldier he’d ever encountered in Europe during the war.

“So, given the age of the pistol, are you saying Zola might have been here since the 40’s?” Steve queried.

“Not unless HYDRA dragged the skeleton over here when this SHIELD building was constructed in 1971. That doesn’t seem likely.”

“Well, yes, you have a point there,” Steve agreed, feeling a bit foolish.

“I don’t have anything else to report right now, so I guess I’ll leave you to digest that news. If you need anything else, just get back in touch, okay?”

Bucky knit his brow in concentration. A moment later, he flinched violently.

“Yeah okay, thanks Nat. Talk to you later,” said Steve, wrapping up the call with hurried politeness.

Bucky stared at the gun with a shocked expression.

“What is it, Buck?”

“Can JARVIS magnify the handle?” he asked, with a tone creeping up towards panic.

“I’m right here sir,” smoothed the butler-like voice with immaculate politeness. Steve thought he detected a slight sarcasm reminiscent of the computer’s inventor in the synthetic speech-modulator, but his chief concern was Bucky’s unexpected reaction to the weapon.

The 3D image of the pistol stopped rotating.

“No, no…the other side,” Bucky stipulated.

“As you wish, sir.”

The image flipped.

“It’s just a pistol, Buck,” Steve soothed. “Like Nat said, thousands of these were made. Everyone around us had one during the war, remember?.”

Bucky ignored Steve’s reassurance. “Zoom in on the base of the handle.”

The image magnified onto a section of the diamond-patterned handle. At the very edge of the base, a small semicircle of the treacly brown grip was worn away to a buttery bronze.

“I used to rub the base of the pistol-grip in its holster with my finger in that exact spot when I was marching through Europe,” he said. “It…it gave me something to do.”

“You wouldn’t have been the only soldier to do that, Buck,” Steve pointed out, with a calm voice. “Lots of troops would have been…”

“Magnify the trigger,” Bucky ordered, so abruptly that Steve flinched.

JARVIS duly obeyed.

“It’s a scratch…just a scratch, Buck.”

“Now closer, towards the base of the inside edge.”

The image focused down still further. Bucky took a sharp intake of breath.

 “I’m afraid we’re approaching maximum capacity for magnification, sir.”

“Never mind, that’s good enough,” Bucky replied, grimly.

Steve squinted at the scratch mark.

“A snake?”

“No, it’s my sloppy cursive,” Bucky said. “It’s an ‘S’, a letter ‘S’. I scratched it there on the way to Europe. “I figured every time I fired that gun, I’d kill Nazis and you’d get a thrill out of being a part of that.”

“An ‘S’ for 'Steve'?”

“Yeah, for you, Stevie. I didn’t think I’d ever see that gun again.”

For a moment, Bucky’s features softened, and a glimmer of a smile appeared. Then, a moment later, a pained expression soured it.

“You do know what this means don’t you?” Bucky whispered, barely pausing before he concluded. “I must have killed Zola.”

“What?” Steve gasped. “How do you figure that?”

“Oh, come on!” Bucky’s tone turned irritable. “It’s my gun. I was down there back then. I was a trained assassin, and he got shot in the back of the head execution-style. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out.”

“He could have committed suicide. You heard Nat.”

“Oh yeah, a monster like Zola has some sudden crisis of conscience and blows his brains out? And he specifically chooses my old infantry pistol to do it with?” Bucky snorted. “Fat chance of that.”

“You don’t know for sure,” Steve insisted. “And if Zola didn’t pull the trigger; it doesn’t mean that you did. Anyone in HYDRA could have fired that gun.”

Bucky didn’t look convinced. “You understand that I don’t care that he’s dead, right? He deserved to die. It’s just…” he sighed. “Steve, I murdered hundreds of innocent people as the Winter Soldier.  Zola was as guilty as sin; he was pure evil. But that doesn’t make knowing I killed him any easier to live with.”

Steve swallowed hard. “Buck, you know I love you know matter what you did back then. It wasn’t you. You were made to do that stuff. But you’re accusing yourself of something you might not even have done. You’re being judge and jury in a case without evidence.”

“What do you mean? There’s a smoking gun right there, Steve.”

“A smoking gun, but no proof as to who fired it. Pierce, or any of his henchmen back then could have done it. Zola himself could have done it. You don’t have any hard evidence.”

“Could the police dust for fingerprints?”

“Maybe.” Steve shrugged. “But after all those years buried in the rubble, it’s unlikely any prints would have survived. And even if they had, anybody could have picked up that gun after it was fired, so the last print on the gun might not be the person who actually pulled the trigger. That's not hard evidence. The police couldn’t convict anyone on the strength of that.”

“Then there’s only one piece of hard evidence left.”

“What do you mean?”

Bucky pointed back to the Dictaphone.

“There might be nothing on it,” Steve warned.

Bucky nodded. “You’re right, but now I gotta know the truth. I didn’t know what to do before. I was looking for a sign. Looks like I just got one.” 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The internet movie firearm database confirms that, during their combat operations in Europe during the 2nd World War, both Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers would have been issued with Colt M1911A1 pistols as side arms. To read more about the Colt M1911A1 pistol, please copy the following address into your web browser: http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Captain_America:_The_First_Avenger#Colt_M1911A1
> 
> p.s. Feel free to check out this amazing piece of Steve Rogers artwork drawn for me by my good friend [Builder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Builder/pseuds/Builder):
> 
>  [Steve Rogers in Uniform](https://imgur.com/a/1KUoZXN)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story of a past life begins. Love, hope...and the seeds of tragedy await Dr. Zola...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A new phase of our mystery unfolds....I hope you'll enjoy the next few weeks of revelations!
> 
> In the meantime, may I thank the inspirational DiamondRaven once again for their superb title artwork:
> 
> You may recognise the library that Zola is looking towards after reading today's episode. 
> 
> Also a big thank you to Builder for their recent picture dedication, which you can view at:  
>  [Steve Rogers in Uniform](https://imgur.com/a/1KUoZXN)

“Do you want to press the ‘play’ button, or shall I?”

Bucky hesitated, then slowly reached out to grasp the mechanism in his hand. “It feels cold.”

He set it back on the coffee table.

“You don’t have to do this, Buck. I won’t think any less of you.”

Bucky forced a tight-lipped smile. “No. No, it has to be done, but…can you operate it please? I don’t think I could trust myself not to crush it in my palm if…”

Bucky left his unspoken fears to wither and die in the silence.

Steve cleared his throat, “It’s probably best if we don’t stop and start it too much. The tape’s thin and weak as it is, and Taj said if it breaks…”

“I know.”

“But if it gets too much, tell me okay?”

Bucky shifted over to the couch opposite Steve. That drew a questioning look.

“This way it’s harder for me snatch it from you if I get angry.”

“You’d prefer that to being close?”

“Believe me, Steve; I ain’t likely to feel like cuddling while I’m listening to that…that monster.”

“That’s…a fair point,” Steve sighed, retrieving the Dictaphone. “Are you ready?”

Bucky swallowed hard, clenching his jaw in determination. “As I’ll ever be.”

Steve sent up a silent prayer for his boyfriend, and depressed the button with his thumb. A hiss of static sprayed from the tiny speaker, and then a voice replaced it; the clipped tones of a Germanic English accent softened by the supple sibilance of an old man’s articulation.

 

-*-

 

**‘People work better to deadlines.’**

**At least that’s what that dog-eared management textbook said that I picked up in the Bronx last week. This is a city of second-hand bookshops, but none of them have the fond memories of that one in Sopot. Do you still remember that tatty little place? The stench of foxed paper and boiled cabbage? I think you might, even after all you’ve been put through, you just might. You smiled as you turned the pages of that book of art plates from the 20s.**

**That was the last time I ever saw you smile, my dearest. This icy shriveled heart warmed inside me for a brief but blissful moment when I saw your lips turn upwards.**

**It didn’t last of course.**

**Nothing ever lasts.**

**But then, that’s the nature of mortality isn’t it? This textbook’s author; I’m assuming he was American given the obsession with time management in the workplace, wrote ‘People work better to deadlines’ but I’m assuming he didn’t dwell on the etymology.**

**Dead line.**

**That’s the line we all have to cross someday, and when we do, time management becomes meaningless, and the workplace suddenly isn’t our problem anymore. I wouldn’t exactly call HYDRA a ‘workplace’, but for years I’ve labored for it, trying to justify why I’m still needed by people who don’t care if I’m alive or dead.**

**And to think that I was once a respected scientist.  I, Dr. Arnim Zola.**

**I don’t know if they ever grew to suspect that I was the one responsible for the failure of their little mind transfer experiment. I suggested the machine would take some time to adjust to my personality, but after nearly a year I think even the stupider ones had worked out that my digitized face grinning back at them didn’t mean that I was actually in there.**

**Why I ever wanted to live this long is beyond me. It’s the one enigma left to solve; the last infuriating puzzle.  Perhaps this…whatever this is…will help me to find out.**

**But it’s unlikely. You see, I have a dead line.  Tomorrow they’re trying again. Like I say, I don’t know if they suspect I was responsible for last year’s failure, but this time I haven’t been permitted to go anywhere near the contraption designed to digitally encode my brainwaves.**

**I can’t allow it. I won’t give those animals the satisfaction of holding me captive for eternity.**

 

Steve recalled Zola speaking to him from the computer system later destroyed by Pierce’s missile-strike.  But was that actually Zola, or just a clever bit of digital trickery designed to look and sound like him?

 

**Eternity.**

Zola’s voice brought him back to the recording.

 

**The last decade flew by, but every second dragged too. Time’s meaningless when you’re treading it. One decade feels very much like the next, when you’re old. Down here, nobody cares about an old man turning 70.**

**When you last smiled, I was 60.**

**When we went to Moscow together, I was 50.**

**When we first met, I was 40.**

**When I got sucked into this nightmare, I was 30.**

**But when I was 20….ah, when I was 20, then there was another man who smiled at me…**

 

Bucky’s bleak impassive face creased a little with curiosity, and Steve’s thumb slid a little further away from the ‘stop’ button.

Steve heard Zola sigh softly, a sound so soft that it barely registered over the static of the tape’s background.

 

 

**I’ve told you about him before, my dearest, but you probably don’t remember, do you? I can’t recall if I ever told you how I met him though. It was in Sweden. You wouldn’t have been more than a little boy at the time…**

**_ **Uppsala, Sweden 1923** _ **

**It was an extraordinary library, the Carolina Rediviva; with its champagne colored walls, cream plaster columns and glittering chandeliers, a breath-taking body of knowledge from a bygone era when books were valued and cherished, rather than burnt like rubbish.**

**Most of the students back then were native Swedes, and my skills in that language were limited, so it took me quite a while to get used to asking for directions. Despite its evident neatness, the book stock always seemed hopelessly jumbled up somehow, and I didn’t want to come to the attention of any of those scary looking librarians, who doubtless would have sent up stern denials if I’d had the temerity to suggest that their taxonomies were in the least bit tricky to navigate.**

**So it was that I blundered into entirely the wrong section, selected a random book and – noticing the color plates –realized all too late that…**

**“Are you studying Michelangelo?”**

**The name of that famous artist was thankfully recognizable in any language, as was the unexpected romantic interest glowing on the young man’s face.**

**I blushed demurely. He was 6 foot tall, effortlessly muscular with a shock of straw-blond hair and startlingly blue almost husky-like puppy dog eyes which pleaded so desperately for a reply, I simply couldn’t be so rude as to ignore him.**

**There was no way my beginner’s Swedish could handle an occasion quite as delicate as this.**

**“I’m sorry,” I blurted out. “I’m not very fluent in your language.”**

**If I’d been in my right mind, I would have repeated this four times, in the languages I’d mastered back then - English, French, German and Italian - but of course I was so flustered by the young man’s desire that the words and the languages came out as hopelessly jumbled as those books on the library shelves were. Luckily, he was as smart as he was handsome.**

**“I’m Einar. Einar Eriksson. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, in flawless German, squeezing my pudgy little paw with the span of his enormous Scandinavian hand.  His limbs seemed somehow far too long, even for his impressive v-shaped torso, as if he were an enthusiastic bounding puppy just growing into his body.**

**A puppy I rather hoped might someday lick me all over.**

Bucky’s jaw dropped. Steve smirked with the effort to keep his laughter to himself.

 

**I blushed at that salacious thought. “Arnim Zola,” I replied “And the pleasure is all mine.”**

**“You never answered my question, Arnim Zola.”**

**“Huh?”**

**“About studying Michelangelo, I mean.” He shot me a cocky grin.**

**“Oh, no…I’m…,” I adjusted my bow tie nervously. “I’m in entirely the wrong place. I was looking for the biochemistry section.”**

**Einar raised an eyebrow.**

**“A scientist?” He sounded impressed and his flirtatious smile spread even wider.**

-*-

**The very next day, we resumed our conversation at a quaint little café on the west side of town, nestled between the monolithic academic bookshops that served the Cathedral and University crowds.**

**I really didn’t know what to make of his invitation, but even if his ardor had cooled, or I’d misinterpreted an interest that was purely professional, it was more thrilling than anything I’d ever experienced in my romantic life to date, and that was surely worth taking a careful, calculated risk over, wasn’t it?**

**“Biochemistry,” I’d explained, in response to the persistent pleading of those puppy-dog eyes. “Is a very new science. Carl Neuberg first coined the term the year I was born.”**

**“Which was?” the puppy leaped in.**

**I blinked, somewhat taken aback. “1903.”**

**“Oh. You’re a little older than me, then.”**

**Afraid to see the disappointment in his face, I slipped off my spectacles, carefully polishing them with my silk spotted handkerchief. “Well, yes,” I winced. “I should have thought that would have been obvious. You’re clearly…”**

**“More childish? Stupid? Clumsy?”**

**“Youthful and handsome,” I corrected, in as stern a tone as I could muster with my knees trembling under the table at the very sight of this enchanting young man, daring to dream that this just might be the beginning of something wonderful.**

**My candor brought a twinkle to his eye. “You think I’m handsome, do you?”**

**There are occasions a personal revelation can lead to a most cruel betrayal. But you never know that at the time, do you, my dearest? And though he was younger, I wasn’t exactly an old man back then myself.**

**“I think you’re adorable,” I said, simply.**

-*-

**Months passed, and then years. My father wrote long increasingly desperate letters begging me to return home to Switzerland. It was difficult for me to read them. My mother had died shortly after I was born so I’d always been very close to him.  He was a good, kind and loving father to me. When he’d seen how much I enjoyed the sciences at school, he’d encouraged my academic studies in the hope that I’d join the lucrative medical profession, but I was studying under Svedberg at the time, and those were heady days of discovery. The man had only recently proved the existence of molecules, and then in 1925 we finally perfected the ultracentrifuge, although these days people don’t use the ‘ultra’ prefix any more than people use the ‘motor’ part of ‘motorcar’ any longer.**

**And if I can lament these changes in language - and, believe me, I do - then how do these fools think I’d cope with an eternity imprisoned inside a machine?**

**But I digress from my…well…this, whatever on earth this is.**

**Dearest Einar graduated a couple of years after me. He chose his art degree out of love, which is utterly charming of course, but it meant he was always destined to play the part of the starving artist in the garret. He lived off occasional city soup rations and by scrawling naïve pastels of the castle, the cathedral and the university for the entertainment of any tourists that passed by, but they were scant enough, even in high summer.**

**Still, he never complained. He studied hard and worked harder, and he wasn’t so stiff-necked and arrogant that he wouldn’t accept a little help from me when the rent was due.**

**Being with him was a delight. I’ll never really know what he saw in a short and slightly rotund – even then – bespectacled Swiss roll like me. I guess love truly is blind.**

**I was going to avoid answering the obvious question for fear of shocking anyone who might hear this, but damn you HYDRA I won’t be silent about those few jewels of joy you couldn’t steal from me.  I hope you’ll forgive an old man a few coarse words, but the honest-to-God truth is that we fucked like bunnies every which way, day and night and it felt absolutely incredible. We fitted into each other’s bodies like we were made for each other, and anyone who says gay sex is unnatural simply hasn’t screwed hard enough.**

**Oh my, that feels better. It’s only taken me 50 years to finally admit that.**

 

Steve pressed the pause button on the Dictaphone whilst Bucky tried to stop himself howling with laughter. Steve was pretty sure some of the emotion was Bucky simply getting the nerves out of his system. Hearing Zola’s voice and discovering he was gay was a lot for him to process.  But it was a joy listening to his boyfriend laugh again, no matter what the cause.

Bucky picked up on Steve’s gleeful grin, and when his giggles finally subsided, he adopted a wistful smile of his own, recalling their romantic past.

“Y’know that’s…that’s…just how I felt when we got together in the bedroom at last, Stevie.”

“Yeah, all that wasted time,” Steve agreed, digging a finger around his collar bashfully. “And we went at it like rabbits too.”

“Still do,” Bucky mused, with a shy grin, nodding for Steve to resume the tape again.

 

**Of course, Einar would have only been paying half a rent bill had we moved in together but honestly, we couldn’t. It simply wouldn’t have been safe for us back then. Sweden’s a pretty liberal country these days but in the 20s, if you wanted to share your lodgings openly, if you really wanted to enjoy true togetherness without the little white lies; then there was only one place in the world you could possibly go to.**

**And that was the first source of our quarrels.**

**“Isn’t there somewhere, anywhere, you could work in Berlin?”**

**The question wasn’t angry, or even barbed, but it still brought a flush to my cheeks.**

**“It’s hardly a hotbed of scientific research right now, dearest. There’s no money in Germany since….**

 

Zola’s voice suddenly became indistinct. Bucky’s breath hitched, and Steve stared at the straining tape, willing the tiny patched-up object to keep going for his boyfriend’s sake. He breathed a sigh of relief, as Zola’s voice abruptly returned to audible levels.

**…besides, though they hotly deny it, in reality they’re just like the English; completely obsessed with eugenics.”**

**“Eugenics? What’s that?”**

**“This fashionable but totally illogical notion that you can breed better people like you do with plants or cattle.”**

**“Seems perfectly reasonable to me.”**

**Snapping at that ill-informed remark was a tempting itch to scratch, but it would only have hurt both of us in the long run. Instead I drew in a deep breath.**

**“It’s a dead end in biochemical enquiry. We all know what happens to in-bred people; all those club-footed, half-witted members of European Royal families that marry their first cousins. And yet, these are the very so-called ‘scientists’ who want the handicapped ‘put to sleep’ like they’re useless, and let’s not even start on what they want to do with the homosexuals.”**

**“But Berlin can’t be like that…it’s…it’s…”**

**“The place for us to go, yes, so everyone says,” I agreed. “Clearly those two concepts don’t fit together properly. Something’s not right about it. I just don’t know who’s telling the truth.”**

**“Then the only way to really know the truth would be to go there and find out!”**

**The infectious enthusiasm of Einar’s irresistible puppy-dog spirit had bounded heedlessly out of his mouth once more; I couldn’t help smiling at that. He knew he had me. My dearest was persistent when his mind totally fixed on something, like a puppy with a bone, and hurting him only ever ended up hurting me. I guess it was a foregone conclusion that I’d have to abandon a promising career in the name of love.**

**What I didn’t know at the time was that I’d be abandoning so much more...**

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Theodore Svedberg is one of the ‘real’ characters in this story. A Swedish chemist working in Uppsala University at the time Zola’s character would have been a student there, Svedberg invented the ultracentrifuge, today simply known as the centrifuge. He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1926:  
> To read more about Theodore Svedberg, please paste the following link into your internet browser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Svedberg


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Betrayed and shamed, Zola's youthful joy is crushed...for now

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In today's chapter, as Zola continues his heartbreaking story, it's time to release the following exquisite artistry - generously gifted by Diamond_Raven - to you, dear readers.
> 
> The rings suggested by this image will circle through the rest of our story. And eagle-eyed readers might spot the first mentions of them today!

**_ **Berlin, Germany 1933** _ **

**I remember that day distinctly because I ran as fast as I could from the library to the university tram stop, my heart pumping. In the few minutes I needed to catch my breath once I’d found a seat on the first service back to our apartment, I considered how far we had travelled down such a dangerous route in only a few short years.**

**Settling in Berlin had turned out to be a mixed blessing. Einar had been right about the freedoms we could openly enjoy as a couple and there was a lively cabaret scene after dark, not just for entertainment, but for the give and take of genuine support and affirmation, without asking for any reward beyond the cost of a round of cheap champagne every now and then.**

“It sounds like they had a better time of that we did,” Steve said, pausing the tape. “Those bars we’d go to in Brooklyn, Buck. They weren’t exactly places for support and affirmation.”

“No, though they could be lively, sometimes,” Bucky added, with a grin. “Still, knowing what would happen in Berlin later, I don’t think I’d have wanted to swap places with Zola and Einar.”

Steve nodded soberly, and resumed the tape.

**Not as if buying our friends in the cabaret cheap, or even expensive, champagne was a particular problem for us anymore. My dear father, convincing himself that the move to Germany meant I was preparing to come home, now stuffed generous quantities of Swiss Francs into his letters. Together with my biochemical lectureship and Einar’s chance find of a job designing artwork for a newly-launched newspaper, things were going well.**

**And then came the hyperinflation. The cost of losing the war hadn’t ended when the dead had been buried; Germany was still paying for it, and by the late 20s the international banks had figured this out. People were rushing their Deutschmarks in wheelbarrows to the shops only to find that they could barely even buy a loaf of bread with it. It made working essentially fruitless, though not pointless. My passion to lecture and research kept me at the university and Einar too felt some kind of loyalty to his fledgling newspaper. Besides, we still had my father’s Swiss Francs to fall back on. We never really went without, and we rapidly found ourselves the toast of the cabaret set, inviting everyone we could to dinner whenever we were able to buy enough food from the near-empty shelves.**

**That’s when the problems really began.**

**“Arnim,” Einar sighed, whilst I was clearing away the plates one evening. “We really need to scale these parties back a little, and be a lot more discrete with our guest list. We’re…well…we’re drawing attention to ourselves, and not in a good way.”**

**I blinked back my surprise. “Attention? Half of Berlin is starving. Do you really think people are going to be bothering themselves with gossip right now?”**

**He placed his hand on my forearm, a reassuring yet faintly disturbing gesture. I almost felt like…like he was trying to restrain me.**

**“People with empty bellies feed on fear…and prejudice…and hate,” he explained.**

**I snorted that absurd idea away.**

**“I knew you wouldn’t believe me. The great intellectual knows best and all that,” he lamented with more than a hint of bitterness to his voice. “So I brought you a copy of the newspaper I was working on today.”**

**I took a seat at the table and scanned the headlines.**

**“It says here that the Communists are hoarding grain,” I said, scratching my head. “Is that true?”**

**Einar barked out a hollow laugh. “Of course it’s not true. But you’ve just proved my point. Newspapers spread gossip. Today’s headlines blame the Communists, tomorrow’s might blame the Gypsies, and the next day there might be a report about some fat Swiss sodomite hosting lavish banquets for the Jews.”**

**“I do wish you wouldn’t persist in using that coarse word,” I hissed.**

**The rest of his casual insult hurt me more than I cared to admit. I thought I’d put those cruel schoolyard taunts behind me, but the traumas of the past have a habit of emerging into the present just when you least expect it.**

**“While I won’t deny my waistline,” I continued. “I’m stung that you’d speak about me like that. You never have before.”**

**Einar gave a placatory shrug. “You understand those aren’t my words, Arnim. Those are the words that the paper would print.”**

**“Well they slid off your tongue smoothly enough.”**

**“I’m in the newspaper business now.” He said, simply. “And anyway, your physical description is merely the window dressing. It’s the identity of the people sitting round your dinner table, _our_ dinner table, that’s becoming a scandal. Good Germans don’t entertain Jews anymore.”**

**“I hardly need to point out to you that neither of us are actually German, Einar.”**

**“But we do have to fit in, or at least try to. Especially since we’re both doing some uhm… _un-German_ activities with each other.” He blushed.**

**It would have been almost endearing, seeing him squirm over our bedroom behavior, if he hadn’t been using his embarrassment to placate me. But I wasn’t in the mood for distractions.**

**“Let’s return to the matter at hand.” I persisted. “We have food, and we invite our friends to share. I haven’t a clue how to cook kosher, so surely I’m not specifically including or excluding anyone, am I?”**

**“You should look at your guest list more closely,” Einar grumbled.**

**I blinked in utter disbelief. “You’re not seriously suggesting I inspect my diner’s foreskins?”**

**“A simple look at surnames would suffice. If you weren’t sure, you could always say Grace before the meal.”**

**I don’t mind telling you, that I actually laughed that right back in his face.**

**“Grace?” I gasped. “Husband dearest, I don’t recall you ever saying Grace in your life, and the liturgy you recited at our wedding, charming though it was, wouldn’t exactly pass muster at the Church altar.”**

**He’d proposed to me a couple of months before the financial crisis began to bite. We’d been waiting until it passed before having a ceremony at our favorite cabaret bar, but when he suggested we went ahead anyway, I could see his point. Each newspaper headline he brought me seemed to ramp up the blame game still further. A low key ceremony at a time where no-one expected largess from the happy couple or their guests, might be preferable to a more lavish event later on that could have provoked jealousies.**

**I think we were right. There wasn’t a lot of razzmatazz, but Einar’s look of puppy dog devotion more than made up for it. Despite the ceremony’s lack of legal recognition, over a hundred of our loyal friends came to support us as we spoke our words of deep devotion to one another, and slid 24 karat gold wedding rings onto each other’s fingers. The hyperinflation was good for one thing at least; practically everyone was pawning their jewelry back then.**

**Little did I know it at the time, but the marriage had indeed provoked jealousies, but from a totally unexpected quarter.**

**This all came to a head several months later, when one of our friends asked me to support him in a court case.**

**“You’re not seriously considering it?”**

**It had been a long day. It was late. I was tired. We were both getting ready for bed. Even though they’d become increasingly common in those days, I really wasn’t in the mood for yet another argument.**

**“Maybe,” I shrugged “I don’t know. I’d need to ask him what kind of support he had in mind.”**

**“You’re a fool,” he spat back. “A naïve fool with your head in the clouds. Can’t you see it’s a sodomy case?”**

**I winced at the word, but in German jurisprudence, it was the correct term.**

**“Since when did the courts start actively prosecuting those?” I asked.**

**“Over a month ago. You don’t read enough newspapers.”**

**“And you read too many,” I shot back. “None of that stuff’s true. You told me so yourself.”**

**“Truth doesn’t sell newspapers. And the newspapers are going to be crawling all over this court case. You’ll be ruining your reputation. You’ll be ruining _our_ reputation.”**

**“Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere. This isn’t about me. This is about you and your friends at the newspaper.”**

**“They’ll be better friends for us to know than those mincing nancy-boys that fawn all over you when we’re out of an evening.”**

**I narrowed my eyes. “Jealous, are we?”**

**Einar flinched. I’d hit a nerve.**

**“They’re only after your money.”**

**“Exactly. My money,” I sniffed. “I can spend it however I like.”**

**“And don’t I know it,” he grumbled. “I don’t suppose you’ve any idea how close you’ve come to being exposed?”**

**“Exposed for what?”**

**Einar looked down at the bedspread in sullen silence.**

**My eyes widened. “Sodomy?”**

**“If the shoe fits,” he huffed.**

**“But Einar, that’s…that’s perfectly ridiculous. Why would I publically place myself in danger like that when I love you and you alone? We’re married for pity’s sake.”**

**“That’s as may be,” his tone grew surly, “But what do you think it looks like, having all these…these…” he noted my pained expression but pressed on regardless “…these sodomites flirting openly with my husband?”**

**“Don’t forget they’re your friends too. And since when did sodomites start calling other people out on their sodomy?”**

**“Since our new Chancellor came to power. Since my newspaper started backing him. Since I started backing him. And they’re not my friends; not anymore. They’re too dangerous.”**

**I knew Einar’s newspaper had backed Herr Hitler in the elections of course, but then almost all the newspapers had; and the ones that hadn’t either supported him now whilst furiously denying they’d ever done otherwise, or had long since ceased to exist.**

**But I hadn’t considered that Einar** **would actually support that evil megalomaniac personally. The shock silenced me.**

**“They’re too dangerous, Arnim,” he repeated, more gently this time. “And you’re too innocent. You’ve been playing with fire these past few months. If you don’t stop, we’re both going to get burned.”**

**“How…how am I meant to stop?” I ventured, still in a daze.**

**Einar sighed. “You’ll just have to let me take charge from now on.”**

**“Take charge? Of what?”**

**“Of what you’re seen to be doing in public. You need to let me choose where you go, who you speak to, and what you do. You’re an academic, so stick to what you’re best at. Go to the university, but come straight home after. No more evenings at the cabaret.”**

**“That sounds very much like an ultimatum.”**

**He nodded gravely. “That’s probably because it is.”**

**“But…but dearest, we’re married,” I protested.**

**“And now it’s going to have to be one of those old-fashioned marriages. If you do as I say, then we’ll be safe. If you don’t, then we’ll not survive the difficult days ahead.”**

**I drew myself up to full height, unimpressive though that may have been.**

**“Einar, they’re Nazis. You can’t reason with them. They want us dead. They want us _all_ dead.”**

**“Not if we’re discrete about things. You’re too open about who you are, it’s not wise.”**

**“Wise?”  I hitched my eyebrows. “My husband the foreskin inspector has the temerity to lecture me about wisdom? Who’s the biochemical scientist and who’s the newspaper boy?”**

**“Your centrifuges can’t predict the future. My newspaper can,” he said, brushing away my slight as if it were a crumb on his tie. “Science won’t keep us safe anymore, only political common sense will. And I’m the one with that common sense.”**

**“So you really think I don’t have any common sense?” I demanded.**

**Einar sat on the bed, patting the space beside him. I dearly wanted to refuse, but his puppy dog eyes pleaded with me, and I could never refuse those eyes.**

**Taking my little paw in his enormous hand, he explained: “Arnim, you are a brilliant scientist; everybody says so. It’s just the nature of the times that makes things difficult for us to be so…well, so ‘open’ with our affections. Now, I’ve had the good fortune to meet the right people in my line of work and I want them to help us.”**

**“Nazis you mean,” I grumbled. “How could Nazis possibly help us?”**

**“If there’s one thing I’ve learned about them, it’s this,” Einar said. “You can either profit by them, or be destroyed. I want to make sure we do more than just survive this; I want us to do well.”**

**I pulled a sour face. This entire conversation was making me feel dirty.**

**“There’s a world of difference between academic wisdom and common sense,” he stressed, “You’re way out of your depth here. If you love me, you’ll let me take charge.”**

**I’m not sure if he knew it at the time, but that last comment cut me to the quick. Perhaps Einar was right. Perhaps I really was out of my depth.**

**“Are you saying I have to obey you?”**

**“You make it sound like slavery when it’s not. It’s for your own protection.”**

**I gulped down my** **anxieties and tried to smooth things over. “Einar dearest, do you think we could keep talking about this tomorrow? We’re just about to go to bed and you know I don’t like going to sleep on an argument.”**

 **“It’s not an argument, it’s the truth. You just need to let that sink into that enormous brain of** **yours.” He smiled, weakly.**

**That night we said no more. We cuddled a little in the early hours for old time’s sake, but got up on different sides of the bed.**

**And so it remained.**

**I thought it might all blow over after a few days, but it didn’t. Einar was never aggressive, but he didn’t hesitate to tell me if he thought my ‘behavior’ in public was dangerous. Sometimes he’d tell me I was being naïve, sometimes delusional, and sometimes just plain stupid.  He objected to me calling him ‘dearest’ any more in case my affection slipped out in public. And if I chose to wear clothes that weren’t conservative enough for his tastes, he’d say I was dressing like a sodomite or, if that didn’t work, he’d sneer and say they made me look old, fat or ugly.**

**As the weeks dragged into months, and the months dragged into years, I began to doubt myself more and more. Perhaps I really was old, fat and ugly?**

**And, though I never told him to his face, Einar did look very handsome in the brown shirt of that Nazi uniform. Einar’s newspaper became a favored read for National Socialist Party members and he’d been rewarded with a position of some influence with their propaganda ministry, so when a series of recruitment posters for the party sprang up all over Berlin depicting a certain muscular, blond haired, blue eyed male with facial features I’d traced countless times with my fingers and my lips, I really didn’t need to ask who had acted as their model.**

**It seemed ironic that, despite his best efforts to keep me on the ‘straight and narrow’, I still found time to ogle lasciviously at Nazi recruitment posters.**

**The dinner parties I held - or rather was asked to hold – now embraced a very different clientele from those I’d chosen to eat at our table in the past. Sometimes I genuinely didn’t understand the conversations, but as their rhetoric grew more extreme I simply chose not to hear them, as I played the gracious host and refilled wine glasses. Einar introduced me as his ‘business partner’, though I couldn’t possibly imagine how he justified a biochemist being on the payroll of his propaganda rag. Outside the home we were barely on nodding terms by now. Occasionally I’d see him in uniform holding a stick or, more likely, beating someone with it, and I’d avert my gaze.**

“Apparently, that’s how it happened,” Steve sighed, pausing the tape. “Once the Nazis got their hooks into you, they’d start controlling everything. And once you were one of them, you’d start controlling others that way too.  It was all about the control. That’s probably why HYDRA got real chummy with them back then.”

“But Einar had never been controlling before. Why didn’t he figure out what was happening to him?"

“He was flattered. Zola was the smart one; the one with the money and the prospects. Suddenly, Einar saw a way to riches and power, and he swallowed his principles to get it.”

“Then why didn’t Zola do the same?”

“I dunno,” Steve said. “He doesn’t sound jealous of Einar’s success, if anything it was the other way round. The only thing I can think is Zola just had stronger principles.”

“That doesn’t sound like Zola,” Bucky protested.

Steve shrugged. “Let’s be honest here, Buck. How much did we really know about Zola before this?”

“Not much,” Bucky admitted. “He was down there with me. He worked for HYDRA. That was enough for me to hate him.”

“And I can hardly blame you for that, given what HYDRA did to you, but we’re learning new things from the tape all the time. Up until an hour ago, we didn’t even know Zola was gay, did we?”

“Or that he got saddled with a control freak who’d turned into a filthy Nazi,” Bucky grumbled.

“So, you wanna continue learning new things?” Steve asked.

“Smart ass!” Bucky snorted, as Steve resumed the tape.

**With Einar out breaking heads with his new friends, I decided staying in university buildings was the safest option. I busied myself with my scientific research. Where I needed to, I kept silent. I complied with the carrot of his requests and the stick of his stinging criticisms without ever once confessing obedience to him in so many words. And in return, he’d come home each evening, we’d eat, talk inconsequential nonsense to each other, cuddle and occasionally make love, without either of us deriving any particular pleasure from the experience any more.** **It had become mechanistic; a task that had to be ticked off the regular list of matrimonial duties. Perhaps Einar Eriksson really had turned into** **my ‘business partner’.**

**On one particularly dispiriting evening, I asked him if he’d prefer it if I went back to my father in Grindelwald, where I thought I’d be safe and loved.**

**Einar considered that for few moments. “It’s not a bad idea, if you’re unhappy here. I guess I’m being selfish keeping you somewhere you really don’t want to be.”**

**“Berlin doesn’t make me unhappy,” I clarified. “It’s what Berlin is turning you into.”**

**“You don’t like me rich and successful? You’d prefer I went back to being the starving artist again?”**

**“It’s not the money; it’s the power, Einar. It’s gone to your head. It’s more important to you now than I am. Can’t you see that?”**

**Einar sighed. “All I can see is the man I used to be in love with.”**

**My voice broke. “You…you don’t love me any longer?”**

**He gently placed his hand on mine “I love you, Arnim. I’m just not ‘in love’ with you. Not anymore. And not for some time now. We’ve become different people, you and I, and we want…well, we want different things out of life. I want to make a big difference in this world and you, well…you want things to go back to the way they used to be, and that’s not going to happen.”**

**I blinked back the tears. Painful though it was to hear, his honesty made me feel close to him once more. Perhaps there might be one last chance to save our relationship.**

**“I’ll do it, then. I’ll go back to Switzerland,” I said. “But only if you come with me.”**

**Einar’s brow furrowed. “Why would I want to do that? I’m doing well here. Where would I be in a land full of cow-bells and cuckoo-clocks?”**

**“You’d be safe. Einar, I know you’re doing well; as your ‘business partner’ we share the same bank account, after all. But I’m afraid. Something bad is going to happen with these Nazis, I just know it.”**

**“And do you think something good is going to happen if you go back to Switzerland with a husband by your side? Do you think your father and the good people of your village will welcome us with open arms?”**

**He was right. He knew I’d never told my father about our relationship. The idea to bring Einar home had only just occurred to me. I simply hadn’t thought it through.**

**Einar smiled sadly. “You can still go home if you want,” he said quietly. “I won’t think any less of you if you choose to do that, but if you go, then you’ll have go alone.”**

**“And if I stay?”**

**“I’ll be content to accept you choice, Arnim, whatever it is. I’ll never stop caring for you, it’s just…well… you’d be well advised to think about what all this means for your feelings. Listen to your heart, and then decide.”**

**Though I never stopped loving Einar, my heart broke that night.**

**All I ever wanted was to be loved; to be needed.**

**Einar didn’t need me anymore. He had outgrown me. In the end, I couldn’t leave him because there was never anyone else for me. I still cared for him a lot, and even if he could only care for me a little, then perhaps we could still make it work. And if it didn’t, at least I could say that I’d done my best.**

**Perhaps one day I’d find someone who did need me that I could love and care for, and who would be glad that I was there for them.**

**One day…**

**But that day was not today, my dearest.**

**That day I had rushed off that tram and into our apartment breathlessly.**

**“Einar, you’ll never guess what happened,” I called out, unwrapping myself from my thick woolen overcoat in the hallway. “Most of the books I’d been using for my latest research project have gone missing from the shelves. I had to question the librarian three times before she’d finally admit what actually happened to them.”**

**Einar hummed something non-committal and indistinct from the back of our apartment. I followed the sound, only to catch him gazing at his reflection in the bedroom mirror yet again.**

**I adjusted my spectacles. “That brown uniform did nothing for you, Narcissus. I’m not sure the black leather is an improvement.”**

**Einar shook his head. “Arnim, don’t talk like a sodomite.”**

**He stopped staring at his outfit, and turned back from the mirror, his judgmental stare boring into me.  “You should be proud that I’m wearing this uniform,” he said. “It buys us privileges and respectability most people can only dream of.”**

**I sat down on the bed and hissed out a leaden sigh. I felt like I was deflating. Perhaps I was. In the months following my decision to stay with him, Einar’s attitude to my public behavior had grown ever more controlling, and in a manner that occasionally bordered on bullying.  He was never physically violent of course, and he generally avoided saying openly hurtful things, but that left him plenty of other methods to strip away the last scraps of my confidence. In one way, I could appreciate, even forgive this behavior. He knew about Nazi policy before it became public knowledge and his interventions doubtless helped steer us away from danger, but I increasingly got the impression that the changes in our relationship were more of benefit to him personally than they were to us as a couple.**

**I should have said something. I should have protested the moment I saw him on those recruitment posters, but I didn’t want to lose the dying traces of his love. I needed to care for someone so badly; I found it impossible to leave him, even when I could have gone back to Switzerland at any time. Even though the man I had once loved was gone, replaced by a stranger sporting his swastika without any regard for what that actually meant to me; to us.**

**He paced over, slipping an arm over my shoulder. I badly wanted to shrug it off, but I was weak. After losing my temper with the university librarian over the lost books, I badly needed the reassurance of touch, even the touch of my ‘business partner’ of a husband.**

**“How many times do I have to tell you, Arnim? If we keep this discrete, if we…” he shook his head.**

**“If we silence half of the cabaret set that watched us cavorting around for the best part of past six years?” I smirked.**

**My wit had turned dark many months ago. For reasons best known to himself, Einar indulged it; preserving a last vestige of the carefree Zola he once loved. Though he was quick to list my many faults, he didn’t like me using my humor to return the favor, so a sly joke lampooning Herr Hitler’s tedious rambles against the ‘sodomite menace’ remained the only opportunity I still had to catch a smile from him.**

**This time, however, he didn’t smile.**

**Because it was no joke.**

**“It could be done,” he agreed. “An anonymous tip-off so no-one questions our motives too deeply.”**

**His words bore no trace of irony.**

**My eyes widened, “You’re not…you’re not _serious_?”**

**My fumbling fingers instinctively sought out that precious picture of the two of us together on our wedding day, now pushed to the back of the bedside table. Our expressions still make me think back fondly, even to this day. After a long passionate kiss, Einar presented me with his particular take on the ‘bridal bouquet’, a little posy of Edelweiss to remind me of home. The bittersweet moment made me regret my own dear father’s absence on that special day, but Einar had returned my blushes for his thoughtfulness with a mischievous grin, coupled with a gaze of such adoration in his puppy-dog eyes.**

**In the few years since that picture was taken, Einar’s gaze had shifted from me alone to millions of Germans through his steely stare on those Nazi recruitment posters, but at that moment I didn’t want to dwell on our present troubles. Brushing my palm along the silver filigree that framed our special day together, and scenting the tiny sprig of Edelweiss I’d secured to it, brought a blissful flashback of those glorious halcyon days – the dark reds and golds of the cabaret decor, the dazzling brilliance of the limelight, the ubiquitous jagged ragtime jazz accompanying those heady champagne bubbles of infectious laughter; and the never-ending stream of hands reassuring, kneading, caressing.**

**Back then, everyone touched each other all the time, in friendship, in flirtation, in the very deepest love. Now my husband’s touch was cold and limp, like a dead fish. That picture was all that was left of the life I’d lost. Back then I was free as the air, toasting liberation with my friends. I was deaf to my father’s pleas and now, still unable to leave my husband for the safety of Switzerland, I’d become marooned in a self-imposed exile of Einar’s design, in the echo-chamber of his ego, listening to him coolly discussing the best option to betray our friends to the murder squads without so much as a second thought.**

**“It’s going to happen to them sooner or later anyway,” Einar shrugged, with a sneer of distaste. “Why get dragged down with the rest of the sodomites?”**

**There was that word again. I’d heard it so many times, I’d given up flinching.**

**“If they’re sodomites, then what are we?”**

**“Smart.”**

**I hadn’t expected a response, since my accusations of hypocrisy usually fell on deaf ears.**

**But his answer was disarming in its honest simplicity. His betrayal had a strange kind of warped logic. Millions of crimes lurk behind silence, and my indignant outrage had corroded away after months of exposure to his caustic criticism.**

**“Then what should we do?” I murmured numbly.**

**“We?” snorted Einar, ruffling an enormous hand through my thinning hair. “There is no ‘we’ any more, publically acknowledged that is. The name of the game is ‘follow the leader’”.**

**“I don’t think I understand.”**

**Einar’s narrow smile broadened out and he addressed me as if I were a child. “When I do what I’m told, I earn promotion, you see?” he gestured at his uniform. “And when you do what you’re told and do your research nice and quiet, without drawing attention to yourself by crying over a few missing books, then ‘we’ can stay together, at least for the time being.”**

**First my shoulder, now my hair. I should have been doubly grateful, but his patronizing little speech shamed me; more even than the dawning realization that I was going to have to start wearing my Fedora hat more often in public now, to disguise that spreading bald patch.**

**“But Einar, I simply can’t carry out my research work without these books. And they’re not just ‘missing’ as you say; they’re gone forever. They’ve been burnt.”**

**“What?” he muttered, distracted by a bit of loose thread on his new jacket.**

**I raised my voice. “That’s what I was trying to tell you, but you were too preoccupied polishing the silver skull on your cap to notice. They’ve burned armfuls of the books I’ve been working on.”**

**“There you go, whining like a pitiful sodomite again,” he grumbled. “Books burn. Make do with what’s left.”**

**There was a time he’d have sympathized. He knew very well that an academic couldn’t work without books. He just didn’t care anymore.**

**I rubbed a palm down my face, desperately trying to coax some kind of rational thought from the shame of his words. “But…but what if they come back and burn more of them?”**

**“You’re a smart man. You’ll figure it out.”**

-*-

**The next month practically flew by, my dearest. Einar’s insults might have made me feel pretty worthless at times, but his last piece of advice had merit at least. I was smart, and I had to figure out how to preserve the knowledge by myself. Of course stealing the remaining books would have been futile, given that I would have needed to remove them from the catalogue records as well to avoid detection, and that would have proved impossible under the close scrutiny of library staff who had grown wary of me following my previous outburst.**

**I asked Einar if he could obtain a small camera for me to photograph the pages, but he pointed out a fatal flaw in that plan that I hadn’t considered. Someone would have had to develop the film, and no-one trusted anyone in Berlin anymore. I couldn’t very well set up my own darkroom without attracting all kinds of suspicion.**

**So, it was back to the old fashioned way. Like a medieval monk, I got out my notepad and pen and started to copy things down. It was soul-destroying work, my dearest, and I began to long for the most trivial of interruptions simply to relieve the sheer tedium of it all.**

**The interruption I received at the end of that month though was far from trivial.**

“Pause the tape will ya?”

Steve pressed the button. “What’s on your mind, Buck?”

“I’m getting confused about who this ‘dearest’ is that Zola keeps talking to.”

Steve nodded. “Who do you think it is?”

“Well I thought I’d figured it out when Zola started calling Einar ‘my dearest’ but now Einar doesn’t want him to do that anymore, he’s still using it, but not about Einar. Now I’m figuring he’s really been saying ‘dearest’ to someone else all along.”

 “Yeah, I kinda figured that too,” Steve said.

“So, who’s his ‘dearest’ then?”

“I got an idea.” Steve shrugged. “But I don’t know for sure yet.”

“Oh, yeah? Who?”

“You’re the last person I’m gonna tell until I know for sure.”

“You can be a pain in the ass, you know that, Rogers?”

“Yeah, but I’m your pain in the ass, Buck.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Okay, I’m just about done talkin’ to you. Crank up the tape again, ya tease.”

Steve pressed ‘play’.

 

-*-

**“How is he?” I demanded.**

**“And what’s it to you?”**

**The junior Gestapo officer, barely old enough to be out of school, looked me up and down from behind his counter as if I were something distinctly unpleasant stuck to the sole of his jack-boot.**

**“Uhm…we share rooms. I…uhm…I…need to know if he can pay the rent for the month.”**

**The sneer on his face grew colder, but then so did the trail I feared he’d been following.**

**“My sympathies; but it really doesn’t matter. He’s no good to anyone now anyway,” he said, with a shrug.**

**Before I had the chance for that news to sink in, his superior appeared from an office along the corridor. I couldn’t tell that just by the uniform of course, they all looked the same to me, but the junior’s sharp salute to attention was evidence enough.**

**The older man was of middling height but broad of shoulder and sharp of elbow. Although his face was a pallid impenetrable mask, the way he carried himself betrayed his inner bully.**

**“At ease,” he mumbled to the junior, leafling through a document “You’re…” he glanced up, directly at me. “You’re Dr. Zola, the biochemical scientist, yes?”**

**My voice squeaked piteously. “That’s correct, sir.”**

**“Very well; follow me.”**

**His office was cramped; the ornately-carved mahogany desk dominating the room clearly harked back to a former age of elegance when the proportion of rooms could accommodate such fine statement pieces. The officer drummed his fingers impatiently on its green leather inlay as I squeezed myself past half a dozen battleship-grey filing cabinets stuffed against the far wall to perch precariously on the stool provided.**

**If this was how he treated his ‘guests’, then I pitied them. Wait, hold on, I was just such a…**

**“So I guess you want to know the condition of your boyfriend?”**

**The interruption to my dark thoughts would have been welcome, had he not immediately confirmed them by his question.**

**I opened my mouth but the expression on his face strangled the denial in my throat. All the same, my right hand instinctively fell to my left.**

**“Oh, please,” he scoffed. “You think I didn’t notice your matching rings the moment I clapped eyes on you?”**

**“How do you…”**

**The officer fished around in his breast pocket momentarily, and then calmly placed Einar’s wedding band on the expanse of green leather between us.**

**I stared at it in stunned silence.**

**“Go ahead; take it. It won’t bite. You paid for it anyway, didn’t you?”**

**A million questions flooded my mind, to which his smug scrap of rhetoric was a tasteless irrelevance. I struggled to speak past the fears bottlenecked in my throat.**

**“But it’s…it’s his,” I rasped.**

**The officer flashed a cold, cruel smile. “Let’s just say he absolutely insisted you have it back.”**

**“That ring’s never left his finger since the moment I placed it there.”**

**“How touching. No doubt some mock ceremony at a vaudeville show,” he smirked. “But if it’s any consolation, be assured that his finger left him before the ring did.”**

**“What?”**

**“An unfortunate accident,” he clarified. “We needed a lot of Stormtroopers to…enforce something…and, well, he was learning too far out of the truck they were travelling on. He was hit by an oncoming car.”**

**Panic set in. Einar may not have loved me very much anymore, but deep down, I still loved him. My reaction was little short of anaphylactic shock. My eyes bulged from their sockets, my tongue swelled and clung uselessly to the roof of my mouth, my skin crawled off my bones. And still, this uniformed devil persisted in his taunting.**

**“You’ll be pleased to know we made the very best of a bad job. The collision severed the arm cleanly enough, so - physically at least - he’ll survive. The perpetrator just happened to be a political opponent, so that was a happy coincidence for us all. At least your boyfriend proved useful.”**

**Even when the power of speech returned, my mind drifted useless and untethered. I was suddenly overtaken by weariness for all this high cynicism and double-talk.**

**“I…I don’t know what to say,” I managed.**

**“You don’t know how happy I am to hear that. I am entirely indifferent to your opinion, and I’m not in the mood to hear any pretty speeches. All I need from you is one simple choice.”**

**I nodded.**

**“Good. So, do you want this…former _‘boyfriend’_ of yours…” he sneered, “…punished or spared further pain?”**

**“Why are you even asking me this?”**

**“Because I know how much trouble he took to erode your self-confidence. He confessed it…” he paused abruptly, “No, that’s not the right word. Actually he boasted about it, and in tedious detail; no doubt in a pathetic attempt to ingratiate himself with his superiors and gain clemency.”**

**I narrowed my eyes, but didn’t give the officer the satisfaction of a response. Not as if that stopped his rambling.**

**“I’m also giving you a choice because it’s within my power to offer up the fate of this man to you, and sometimes I gain a sense of pleasure out of sharing the power to inflict pain on those I no longer have a use for. You’ll be aware no doubt that we’ve just brought in a new law to legalize eugenic sterilization for those the state deems unfit to breed. It’s only a short step from that to…well…you’re a scientist. I think you appreciate where this line of reasoning takes us, don’t you?”**

**His line of reasoning was plain enough, but oh how I loathed the unscientific principle it was based upon.**

Steve paused the tape. “You know, he was ahead of his time.”

“Who? Zola?”

Steve nodded. “I remember in the 30s, even a lot of American scientists believed in eugenics. Kids these days don’t have a clue how fixated folks were on the idea of breeding better people.”

“It was only the Nazis that wanted to create a ‘master race’ though.”

“Thank God,” Steve said. “Because I was the complete opposite of that; a little guy who didn’t have any health or strength at all. That’s why Dr. Erskine picked me.”

“Dr. Erskine picked you because you respected the strength you’d been given. You ain’t no bully, Rogers.”

“And the only thing I hate worse than bullies are Nazi bullies. You realize that, before the serum, the Nazis would probably have had me sterilized?”

Bucky cast Steve a stormy look. “I’d have killed anyone who laid a finger on ya, Stevie.”

“Have I told you recently how much I love you, Buck?”

Bucky snorted. “Shit, Stevie. I never tire of hearin’ it”

“Then I love you, Bucky Barnes,” Steve said. “I’d punch every Nazi in Europe just to be by your side.”

“Yeah, well you pretty much did that when we was in Europe anyway, didn’t you, ya punk.”

“Jerk,” Steve retorted. “You wanna…?” he tilted his head at the Dictaphone

“Yeah, go on.” Bucky nodded.

 

**“Eugenics again,” I huffed. “Can’t you Nazis think of any other way to justify yourselves?”**

**“I hardly think the National Socialist party needs to justify eugenic sterilization to a sodomite couple desecrating the state of matrimony. Which one of you was planning to have the baby anyway?” he sneered.**

**“I wasn’t under the impression you were in the business of issuing cheap insults.” I spat back.**

**The officer raised an eyebrow. “Nothing I do is ever cheap, Dr. Zola. I am merely stating biological fact to a biochemical scientist. It is no insult to observe that, whilst you may be a genius, the one thing you will _never_ be is a father.”**

**That turned a knife in my heart. How dearly I would have loved to have cared for a son as deeply as my own dear father had cared for me. But the officer was right. I was childless and always would be.**

**“Honestly, I’m surprised you misjudged me that way,” he shrugged. “But then intellectuals rarely possess emotional intelligence. For the benefit of your poor wounded feelings, allow me to rephrase my proposal.  I am merely offering you the opportunity to you choose the fate of your worthless ex-boyfriend, since you’re clearly the only bleeding heart left in Berlin who still sees the purpose of a one-armed Stormtrooper.”**

**“I’m surprised you’re being so considerate,” I remarked sarcastically. “If he’s so worthless, why are you even wasting words on him? What is he to you anyway?”**

**The officer snorted. “He’s nothing to me and, quite frankly, nothing to you either. But I have a natural inclination to cruelty, so when the truth hurts, I’m only too pleased to apply it undiluted. In short, any safety his position might have bought you in the past is now over. He’s angrily refuted any feelings he ever had for you; if he ever had any genuine feelings to begin with bearing in mind how plainly mismatched the pair of you are.” He looked me up and down with an expression of amused distaste.**

**That truth burnt like acid. It would have given me great satisfaction to deny it, but though I knew Einar still cared, I also knew he loved power a lot more than he loved me. It came as no surprise that he’d deny his feelings for me in an instant if he thought he could still cling onto that power, and the simplest way to convince his interrogators would be to boast about his control over me and parade my comparative ugliness before them.  All of this I could understand, but my burning sorrow wasn’t reserved for myself, it was for Einar. I knew he still loved me deep down. In the end, he hadn’t betrayed me; he had betrayed himself.**

**“Your dishonor gladdens my heart,” the officer chuckled coldly, entirely misreading my downcast expression as self-centered shame. “But I’d take infinitely more pleasure in it if you learned something from this experience. Clearly no man will ever look at you twice again, except in disgust, but I possess the means for you to turn that to your advantage, if you wish.”**

**These petty insults were so wide of the mark that they didn’t even register.  I’d lost all interest in listening to this man’s swaggering. Nevertheless, he knew Einar’s whereabouts, and he’d extended some vague kind of invitation to me. Perhaps the two might be linked?  Feigning curiosity, I glanced up at his ridiculous sneer.**

**“What was it that Shakespeare’s deformed King Richard III said?” he pondered. “‘Since I cannot prove a lover, then I’m determined to prove a villain’, is that not correct?”**

**I nodded a confirmation. English literature wasn’t exactly my field of expertise, but my early schooling had given me a good enough grounding in the classics.**

**“If men won’t love you, Herr Doctor, then you can at least make them respect you. Come and work for me, and I’ll prove it. You’re a good scientist, a thorough scientist, a scientist with a cool head and a cold heart. And that’s exactly the kind of scientist we need.”**

**“I’m not working for the Nazis,” I grumbled.**

**The man grinned so wide, I honestly thought his face was going to split wide open.**

**“My dear doctor, whoever said anything about working for the Nazis? I want you to work for an institution with far loftier ambitions. My name is Schmidt, and I represent a multinational organization called HYDRA.”**

 

Steve nearly dropped the Dictaphone in shock. Bucky arched an eyebrow at him, as the voice continued.

 

**“Our sole relationship with the Nazis is to exploit them whilst they’re strong enough to help us with our plans - our plans to ensure that sensible order and control is enforced upon the world. If they fail, we go on…we shall always go on!”**

**First Shakespeare quotes, and now a dramatic monologue of his own, and all this from the man who said he wasn’t in the mood for pretty speeches. I didn’t point that out at the time of course, I was far more concerned about what kind of work he was going to put me to, and whether Einar’s safety as well as my own might be granted through my acceptance of his offer. He even confirmed this by continuing:**

**“I can guarantee you safety, sustenance, shelter and anything you need to pursue your scientific endeavors, including a lifetime’s supply of those hideous bow ties that quite frankly don’t suit you, but I suppose there’s no accounting for taste. And since you exhibit such a disinclination to it, I can even promise you that your work won’t directly entail any eugenic experiments.”**

**He had me at ‘safety’, if he did but know it. Probably he did.  And if I could be offered safety, then Einar might yet have a chance to share it with me.**

**Tentatively, I inched my hand over the green leather and grasped the gold wedding ring in my fist, before nodding my dumb consent.**

**“Now, there’s a sensible fellow. What is your choice?”**

**“But…but I’ve just chosen.”**

**“No, not that,” he waved away my misunderstanding. “I mean the choice over your ex-boyfriend. How much suffering would you care to inflict?”**

**“I…I don’t understand. I thought you said punished or spared?”**

**“Punished or spared further pain,” Schmidt clarified, “We’ve recently built a Concentration Camp for political prisoners in Upper Bavaria; a place called Dachau. I can ensure that Eriksson is beaten daily, starved and worked to death in a particularly grisly manner, assuming his wound doesn’t reopen and turn horribly septic first.”**

**I couldn’t hold back an involuntary gasp.**

**“Or…there’s always that ‘eugenic sterilization’, taken to its logical conclusion of course.”**

**It wasn’t difficult to guess the manner of his ‘logical conclusion’: a syringe filled with something you wouldn’t wake up from.**

**Still, if Schmidt was minded to clarify his options, this might be the opportunity to introduce something more favorable.**

**“Is it perhaps possible to negotiate a third outcome here?”**

**“Negotiate?” A lopsided grin spread across Schmidt’s face. “Do I honestly look like the kind of person who takes notice of anyone else’s opinion?”**

**“Appearances can be deceptive, Herr Schmidt.” I knew those words were almost certainly untrue in his case, but if there was even the slightest possibility that this could improve Einar’s chances of survival, then I simply had to try.**

**I was in luck. My observation hadn’t caused Schmidt’s amused grin to fade.**

**“Go on. I’m listening.”**

**“Would it not be possible to just patch Einar up and exile him to some remote place to process paperwork for the rest of his natural life?”**

**Schmidt shook his head glumly.  “How thoroughly predictable. I was hoping for something a little more creative from you than the desperation of a spurned lover. If I’d wanted overblown melodrama, I could simply have attended last night’s performance at the Berlin State Opera. At least their pleading comes with a catchy tune you can hum along to.”**

**“But he could be useful to you still,” I insisted.**

**Schmidt sighed heavily. “I’m probably wasting my breath on you Dr. Zola, but let me try and spell this out for you logically, in a way that even a scientist can understand. This man is worthless; absolutely worthless. He is expending valuable resources simply by breathing. His mere existence is offensive to me. Now, do I make myself clear?”**

**I dearly wanted to object, but I could sense Schmidt’s mood was rapidly darkening. I couldn’t risk him withdrawing those meagre terms he’d offered already. The horrific prospect of a concentration camp was the only threat I could protect Einar from now. But that protection came at a cost.  Compliance.**

**“Eminently clear,” I nodded.**

**“Good,” he said, reclining back in his chair. “Now, the death of your ex-boyfriend can be quick, or it can be slow… painfully slow. The choice is yours, but if you want him to die quickly, then you’ll need to loosen that stubborn tongue of yours, and specifically order the manner of his death to me, right now.”**

**I practiced the words in my head, and silently in my mouth in the moments before I uttered them. But I still loved Einar, I just couldn’t bring myself to say those words out loud.**

**“I want him…”**

**“Yes?”**

**“I want him…gone.”**

**Schmidt furrowed his brow. “‘Gone’? And what exactly do you mean by ‘gone’?”**

**“I want him…to…not suffer anymore”**

**Schmidt’s stare intensified. “Could you be a little more…specific?”**

**“I want him…put…out of his misery.”**

**He leaned back further. Clearly he was still taking great pleasure in watching my pain. The line of his mouth twisted into an obscene grin. “I still don’t think I follow you. Why don’t you try that again?”**

**I unraveled the bow tie at my throat, gasping at the effort to placate this devil with my words.**

**“You know, I can wait all day,” he said, his expression assuming nonchalance. “But if you don’t give this order eventually,” he continued, a sudden sharpness seeping through his tone. “Then your cripple is going to Dachau. Do you want that on your precious conscience? Your choice is simple. Either you speak, or he suffers. So…speak.”**

**I swallowed thickly, and in a hoarse whisper, managed to spit out the words, “I want him killed. Quickly.”**

**Schmidt smiled and nodded. “Euthanized,” he corrected punctiliously, “Put to sleep. Given your quaint predilection for veterinarian metaphors, I trust you’ll find that’s the correct term.”**

**“Yes. That.”**

**“So…do you…wish to administer the injection yourself? I can certainly arrange…”**

**“No!” I shrank away in horror at the mere suggestion. “No, just…just tell me when it’s done.”**

**The instant I’d given the order, the guilt overwhelmed me. Schmidt had forced me to say the words that would kill my husband. He may have offered me precious little choice over the matter, but I couldn’t unsay them.**

**I’d become a monster. I had ordered my husband’s death. I’d killed him. I’d murdered him as surely…as surely as if I’d strangled him…with my own bare hands.**

The voice on the tape subsided into faint sobbing. Steve's heart ached to hear the sheer rawness of the old man’s suffering. He’d confessed to Einar’s murder, but the grief in Zola’s voice told a very different story. This was no monster. This was just an innocent man, no doubt one of many, stage-managed into a cycle of guilt by the endless cruelty of HYDRA. And on the couch opposite, Steve saw the shock on Bucky’s face as he realised Zola had been haunted by the same toxic guilt as he had. The man Steve loved, the man who one day might well become _his_ husband; fisted away the tears from his eyes, as Zola’s voice shakily resumed his story.

 

**“Don’t look so sour,” Schmidt huffed. “Your first murder is always the hardest. It’ll be easier next time.”**

**“Next time?”**

**“You’ll learn to enjoy it, to savor its taste, just as I do,” he assured me, offering up a smile of such sickly sweetness that it turned my stomach. “Come, let’s have lunch together to discuss HYDRA’s plans in detail. My treat.”**

**And that’s…that’s how it started, my dearest. That’s how a good doctor regressed into an evil scientist. When I had nothing left to live for, I had nothing left to stop the monster that would soon emerge from the shadow of the late Einar Eriksson.**

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A new hope appears...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fans of the Captain America movies will be aware that in CA:TFA, Zola is captured on the train and yet Bucky awakens to see Zola repairing his arm. As this is a continuity error, I have needed to make some minor changes to canon in order to place these scenes in a logical order. I hope that readers will bear with me and forgive these changes for the sake of clarity in ‘I Zola’.

 

**_ **Kraków , Nazi-occupied Poland 1943** _ **

**“But Herr Doctor, you must appreciate how short we are of just about everything these days.”**

**I nodded sympathetically. I’d quickly mastered Polish, but though my command of scientific terminology was sufficient to request chemical compounds most of his customers wouldn’t have even known existed, the fact remained that if it wasn’t in the pharmacy, then I might as well have been asking for the moon.**

**“What’s it for anyway? And don’t give me that story about the scars on your forehead again.” He winced at livid weals which were thankfully beginning to fade. “It’s clear to me now that you’re not using this stuff to ease your own pain.”**

**“And how could you possibly know that?”**

**Pankiewicz flashed me one of his piercing stares. That heroic young chemist, with his calm demeanor, kindly smile and perfectly dimpled bow ties, was remarkably adept at sniffing out red herrings. I was only grateful his senses weren’t keen enough to scent the exquisite sweetness of gangrene suppurating from my rotting soul.**

**I’d been honest once before, in confessing my love to the young man who would become my husband. The consequences had been deadly. I hesitated to share confidences again, especially with so good a man, so I skirted round the issue. “You know I can’t leave the ghetto.”**

**“I know.”**

**He’d seen me try to sneak out once before. I may not have been wearing the Star of David, but the gate guards had orders to detain me on sight, and following my little incident with the serum, my scarred forehead made me all the more distinctive. I was trapped.**

**“I could help you.”**

**“No…no you couldn’t,” I warned him, sternly. “You’re the only hope for these people. If you get into trouble, then what will they do?”**

**“God will provide.”**

**“And you are his instrument, so don’t go breaking yourself needlessly, and certainly not on my account.”**

**“If I break, God will provide someone else. He always provides for his people.”**

**“Not for me. I’m not his people. God has entirely forsaken me. Or rather I have forsaken him.”**

**“Don’t say that,” he protested sharply.**

**I sighed. Further debate was pointless, and the chemist lapsed into a hurt silence.**

**His little consulting room at the rear of the pharmacy was cramped, almost as cramped as Schmidt’s Berlin office, but altogether less secure. Anyone could burst in at any time. I eased a finger around the inside of my collar, trying my best to stay cool, calm and collected, but that didn’t stop my spectacles from inching down the bridge of my nose on a sheen of nervous sweat. In desperation, I tried again.**

**“Herr Pankiewicz, do I get the analgesia or not?”**

**“What do you want it for? Who are you _working_ for, Herr Doctor?”**

**Forced labor had become a sad fact of life for the thousands of Jews pressed into the Kraków ghetto back then, so I resisted the temptation to correct him. Disclosing the details of my servitude wasn’t going to get me what I’d gone there for.**

**“Look, I’m treating somebody who is in a great deal of pain. The people who give me orders provided anesthetic, but no analgesic.”**

**Pankiewicz gasped. “What kind of monsters…”**

**“The kind like me,” I cut in, firmly pushing my spectacles back into place. “I’m as bad as they are, so spare me your outraged indignation.”**

**“I find that very hard to believe.”**

**I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell him how many Allied POWs I’d helped torment, strapped to operating tables; how I could hear their piteous pleading and screaming even in my tortured dreams. If I’d told him, he’d have spat in my pock-marked face sooner than help me.**

**“I am a bad man,” I said, simply, “I don’t care if you believe me or not, but I _am_ a bad man. God will avenge himself upon my wickedness someday. But until that day comes I have the chance to ease the suffering of another, at least for a time. Now, do I get the analgesia?”**

**The chemist unlocked a drawer in his desk, and handed me a package about the size of half a house-brick, smothered haphazardly in brown paper and tied together with pink string.**

**“It’s veterinarian grade,” he warned. “Before the war, it would barely have made it into a school chemistry laboratory, so be very careful with the dosage, Herr Doctor.”**

**“I understand,” I nodded, squirreling it away into the false bottom of my Gladstone bag. “Now, touching on the matter of payment...”**

**“Don’t embarrass yourself with paper promises. I know you have nothing left,” Pankiewicz cut in. “That’s evident by your desperation. But I believe you when you say you’re helping someone else. That’s payment enough for me.”**

**I couldn’t contradict the naked truth so I swallowed hard and nodded.**

**“Besides,” he added, with an amiable shrug. “Money’s all but useless these days anyway. The guards can charge what they like for anything in here, and the color of my money’s no better when I’m outside the ghetto each evening. You’re not the only one the guards keep files on.”**

**“Paper money’s only worth what others say it’s worth,” I agreed. “Besides, it can be recalled or devalued by the government at any time, assuming hyperinflation doesn’t erode it away to nothing first, and we both know what that feels like. What you really need is a currency that’s portable and holds its value.”**

**Slapping the Fedora back on my head, I scrambled hastily to my feet. “Well, thank you for your assistance. Good day to you, Herr Pankiewicz.”**

**By the time I’d gained the door I heard him desperately calling me back, “Herr Doctor, Herr Doctor! Oh, but don’t you see?  On the table? Your ring. You’ve left…you’ve left your wedding…”**

**I slammed the door shut.**

-*-

 

**“Hold still now.”**

**I eased the hypodermic in as gently as I could, and waited until the stress in your face began to ease a little.**

**“Better?”**

**“Better,” you gasped.**

**“I had to adjust the dosage. It’s a rather crude cocktail, and with your physiology, it’s all but impossible to calculate the strength with any accuracy, so please don’t try to tough it out again. Tell me when the pain gets too much for you to handle next time.”**

**“How long…”**

**“Until it properly subsides? Who knows? I may have attached it, but I wasn’t responsible for the composition of your prosthesis, and mating organic and inorganic material together is rarely a recipe for instant homeostasis.”**

**You tilted your head to glance at the gleaming silver limb. “It startled me at first.”**

**Your statement of the obvious was quite disarming.**

**“Yes, I gathered that when you started incessantly clawing at it with your fingers,” I answered, with just a hint of dark amusement. “That’s after you’d finished breaking necks of course. But I’m afraid your antics have only aggravated the scar tissue and intensified your pain.”**

**You nodded matter-of-factly. “So, where did you get the drugs from?”**

**“A friend,” I murmured, guardedly.**

**As you watched me carefully decant the remainder of the solution I’d made up from Pankiewicz’s present into a hip flask, you queried:**

**“The same friend as the last time, or a different one?”**

**“I can’t see what bearing that information has on your treatment.”**

**“None I guess,” you shrugged as best you could within the confines of the restraints securing you to the gurney. “It’s just I never had me any buddies who ever knew about stuff like that, let alone how to get a hold of it.”**

**“There’s no black market where you come from?” I asked, slipping the hip flask into the inside pocket of my white lab coat.**

**“Sure there is. Brooklyn’s full of crooks, but your friends are on an altogether…different scale.”**

**“Oh really?” I replied with a cautious smile. “And what do you mean by ‘different’, Sergeant Barnes?”**

**I half expected one of your notorious wisecracks at my expense. You could be unpredictable when the pain in your arm was bad enough to ask for my help. Instead you said:**

**“Well, y’know…wise. Like you, I guess.”**

**I didn’t ask what you meant by ‘wise’. Einar had already done that for me a decade earlier. My kind of rarefied academic wisdom wasn’t common sense. I was only fit for bookshelves and syringes. Dwelling on the impracticality of my intelligence caused my faint smile to dwindle away.**

**I shook my head. “When madmen start burning libraries, it’s wiser to hide your wisdom.”**

**“Well, I ain’t ever had much time for libraries,” you said. “But making yourself look dumber than you are sounds well…just plain dumb.”**

**My face lit up at your gentle teasing, dearest. “That’s a charming way of putting it,” I conceded.**

**“You know what else is dumb?” you queried.**

**“What?”**

**“Staying down here when you could be free.”**

**“You think I could be free, do you? Would I even want that?”**

**“Sure you would. And I reckon you’re smart enough to figure out one heck of an escape plan.”**

**You’d laid out the dots with a bold flourish, leaving me to join them. It was a pleasure to stroll willingly into your carefully laid trap.**

**“And when I execute this ‘escape plan’, you’d be on hand to provide me with the appropriate muscle, I presume?”**

**“If that’s what you want.”**

**You’d adjusted your tone of voice and facial expression to a perfect pitch of neutrality.**

**You might have been playing dumb, but I could tell right away that you were every bit as smart as I was. I’d seen you counting uniforms during your captivity, trying to calculate the strength of the enemy, but I doubt you had the slightest conception of just how many HYDRA guards were swarming around that facility, not to mention its location right in the middle of a heavily guarded ghetto, surrounded by a quarter of the German army East of the Rhine. It’s not that I doubted your courage, or even your sincerity, but any escape attempt would have been utterly futile, and Schmidt had a connoisseur’s taste in torturous executions. I didn’t relish the prospect of a slow protracted death, still less to condemn you to the same fate.**

**“It cannot be done,” I said, soberly.**

**“How do you know unless you try?”**

**“I know,” I confirmed. “I have secured you a purpose here, Sergeant Barnes. I cannot see you throw your life away in such a pointless endeavor.”**

**Your neutrality soured into a scowl.**

**“Who in the hell do you think you are, telling me what my ‘purpose’ is? I’m not some goddamn weapon, I’m a person.”**

**“If you were a weapon, then you wouldn’t feel pain,” I said. “And we’ve clearly established that you do. There are people in this place who delight in inflicting pain. My task is to keep you away from them, and placing you in danger by facilitating a futile escape attempt isn’t particularly high on my list of priorities.”**

**“What’s at the top of your list then, huh? Crawling on your belly for HYDRA?”**

**“No, keeping you safe,” I said, simply.**

**“How…how can I be safe,” you demanded, exasperated. “When the guards could just burst in at any time and drag me away to who knows where?”**

**You had a point, dearest. I couldn’t dispute with you about that.**

**“You…you have the power to let me out of here,” you exclaimed. “You could just order the guards to release me if you wanted.”**

**“Be reasonable, Sergeant Barnes,” I counselled. “Think about this logically. Have you seen any guards standing to attention when I walk into a room?”**

**“But those guys who were helping you earlier…” you began.**

**“The technicians?” I queried. “I think you’ll find they’re the only people down here lower in the pecking order than I am. Believe me, Sergeant Barnes, We’re both prisoners here.”**

**“You’re no prisoner. You’ve made it very clear you don’t even want to try and escape.”**

**“Don’t confuse a lack of action with a lack of desire. An escape attempt would only succeed in getting both of us killed. Can’t you see that?”**

**“All I can see is you, standing over me. You’re. No. Prisoner,” you repeated, emphatically.**

 

-*-

 

**Technically you were correct. The designation of ‘prisoner’ had never officially applied to me. But it may as well have been. To begin with, Schmidt had stayed true to his word. I’d been treated with a certain amount of respect, admiration even, and I derived a grim satisfaction in knowing my kind of intelligence was valued, given Einar’s repeated mockery of my lack of common sense. But my husband’s death lay heavy on me, and when Schmidt judged my theoretical work on his supersoldier serum to be nearing completion and insisted on advancing the research by swapping test tube trials for human ones, I realized he’d been deadly serious about me growing used to killing.**

**You see, when I told you escape was impossible, I was speaking from personal experience. My own attempt on the way to the HYDRA base in Azzano was, in hindsight, even stupider than the one you’d just proposed to me, my dearest. I couldn’t run more than 500 feet without wheezing like an old man, and there was no place to hide on the open road. I was recaptured within the hour.**

**I was never given a chance after that. Suddenly, instead of sitting in the back of a comfortable staff car, I was handcuffed in the rear of a truck, surrounded by guards.**

**When I arrived at the base, I was given my orders, to develop the serum through scientific experiments using the human test subjects provided, on pain of death. The delicate matter of whose death was never clarified, but the threat was clear enough.**

**Clearly, the POWs in Azzano were just a cage of lab rats to HYDRA, but I refused to see them that way. And if Schmidt wanted his experiments conducted scientifically, then I would use that science against him. For a start, all randomized control trials require a control group; the individuals who receive a harmless placebo rather than the proposed ‘treatment’. There were recommendations for the size of such a group, but no firm rules. I was perfectly entitled to choose an enormous control group amounting to 99.9% of the test subjects if I so wished, wasn’t I?**

**Schmidt saw it differently. Although his mind was slowly unhinging over an obsession with the occult at that time, he still had sense enough to monitor the death rates of my experiments, and when all the prisoners seemed to miraculously survive, he ordered the guards to give me a good thrashing and dispatched one of his lieutenants to monitor my testing. Even then, I wasn’t entirely out of options. I added a swift-acting poison to the serum, so that at least those poor prisoners I had no option but to dispatch fell asleep painlessly.  Strictly speaking, HYDRA’s Azzano facility was part of the adjacent Nazi Prisoner of War camp, so, before the soldier’s bodies were incinerated, I took care to gather as many of their personal effects as I could and handed them over to the decent and honourable German officer at the Prisoner of War camp responsible for repatriating such effects to relatives. It wasn’t much, but if such a gesture might offer a shred of comfort to the bereaved, then it was worth the sneering mockery of the HYDRA guards.**

 

“I never guessed he was doing that,” Bucky murmured as Steve pressed the pause button. “I still have some hazy memories of Azzano. I saw some of the prisoners handing letters, watches and other keepsakes through the cell bars to Zola, but I figured they were just trying to bribe him. I remember the guards were laughing real loud at all of this, but I didn’t think nothin’ of it at the time. Now I understand. Those guards weren’t laughing with Zola, they were laughing _at_ Zola.”

“How much did know about the experiments back then?” Steve asked, cautiously.

“Nothing, no-one did. And I guess that would’ve been a good thing. I mean, if someone pulled you out of a cage, strapped you to a table and jabbed a needle in your arm, you’d holler at the top of your lungs wouldn’t you? That’s only natural. And that’s what Zola was counting on. That the prisoners would raise all hell so the guards would think he was really hurting ‘em. But he was putting himself in a lot of danger by fudging those tests.”

“Yeah, Schmidt found him out eventually,” Steve agreed. “I guess it was brave of him to try though, right?”

Bucky nodded as Steve resumed the tape.

 

**Of course I got a brief taste of being a prisoner of war myself shortly after that, but revealing the story of my capture by the Americans might well have upset you given that if you’d been captured by them instead of me, then you’d be home by now.**

**Let me try and explain. After the Allied attack, HYDRA chose to abandon Azzano for the comparative safety of its base in Poland. That’s where I was headed to on that train trip through the mountains. When we came under attack, I had no idea that you were fighting alongside the Allied troops, or that you had fallen into a ravine to your almost certain death. All I knew was that the attempt to capture me had failed, but at the expense of the railroad line which had been damaged beyond repair when the train derailed.**

**The convoy of vehicles Schmidt dispatched to enable us to complete our journey arrived only a few days later. I was grateful for his indecent haste, as I’d nearly lost my toes to frostbite in the overturned carriage the HYDRA agents converted into a makeshift prison. After that, I found myself once more swaying at the back of a truck, handcuffed and surrounded by guards. That was until you were found and brought in with catastrophic injuries following your horrendous fall, my dearest. They removed the handcuffs then. They needed my hands. You needed my hands.**

**From then on in, stabilizing you was my sole priority. I didn’t have time to even consider that the Americans might mount a second attack before we reached the Polish border, which is why it was so shocking when our truck lurched abruptly off the road in a desperate attempt to dodge the mortar rounds exploding all about us. Once the initial fighting died down, I recognised the American-English accents calling on us to surrender. I yelled back to the American troops from the back of the medical truck, begging them to rescue you first.**

**With the benefit of hindsight, the outcome of my action was entirely predictable. After a swift punch to the face, one of the HYDRA guards handcuffed me to him and dragged me outside. In the chaotic gunfight which followed, the guard got killed and, too panicked to search through his pockets for the keys, I was effectively immobilized by his dead weight. As the circling Americans troops closed in, my gaze stayed fixed to the medical truck speeding away from me with you in it, my dearest.**

Bucky furiously signaled to Steve to pause the tape again.

Steve gave him an amused smile.

“Okay, I can’t fool myself any longer; not now he’s talking about his ‘dearest’ falling from the train. But you knew Zola was speaking to me all along, didn’t ya, Stevie?”

“I…suspected,” Steve said. “Zola’s been having a conversation with someone in the sub-basement who wasn’t answering back. I’m guessing you were frozen more often than not, so…”

Bucky groaned.

“I…guess that really bothers you,” Steve said, soberly. “Come to think of it, it’s all a bit crazy, him talking at you this whole time when you couldn’t even hear him, let alone answer him.”

“Maybe a little,” Bucky shrugged. “But I’m a lot more bothered about him calling me ‘dearest’.”

“Oh,” Steve blushed. “Yeah. You being freaked out by that kinda makes sense too. I know you were never really into the sweet talk.”

“Now you know that ain’t true, Stevie,” Bucky protested. “I love it when you call me ‘sweetheart’. I just never felt comfortable using pet names for you myself. You weren’t my honey or my sugar or my babydoll. Those were what I might have called some of the girls, but not you.”

“Back when we’d go to those bars in Brooklyn where guys could dance together, you only ever called ‘em by their first names didn’t you?”

“Damn straight. They weren’t special to me the way you were. It’s just that…” Bucky blushed, bashfully. “It took me a long while to feel comfortable even calling you Stevie, even though I love you so damn much.”

Steve colored so adorably, Bucky couldn’t resist sneaking in for a cheeky kiss.

 When their lips finally parted, Steve asked. “So, how did you feel when I first started calling you ‘sweetheart’?”

Bucky about that thought for a moment. “It felt okay. I mean, it’s a name you can use for boys as well as girls, right?”

“Right,” agreed Steve. “But then so is ‘dearest’, when you come to think about it.”

“Yeah but…” Bucky hesitated. “Zola’s used that for his husband. Using it for me, well….that feels kinda creepy right now.”

“I know, Buck. I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought this up in the first place?”

“Hey now,” Bucky protested. “Who told who to pause the tape?”

“You didn’t tell me, you just waved your arm around. It’s lucky I know your arm signals, ain’t it?”

Bucky barked out a couple of gruff laughs. Steve was reminded of the laughter Bucky had used to relieve the tension when Zola told them he was gay. He hoped this laughter had produced the same effect.

“And what kind of arm signal do I need to give to ask you to start the tape up again?”

“You sure you’re ready?”

“Heck Stevie, I can deal with a few ‘dearests’ as long as he don’t go no further than that.”

Steve pressed the button, and Zola’s voice continued.

 

**I’d been a HYDRA prisoner and then an American prisoner. That was until HYDRA broke into the American camp to abduct me so I could serve them once again. So I guess in all I’ve been a prisoner three times over.**

**I really didn’t want to be angry with you, dearest. You had enough pain of your own to deal with. But I couldn’t pretend the offer from Colonel Philips at that American base to grant me a pardon and send me back home didn’t ache in my heart. Even though I never had a chance to choose before HYDRA came back for me, I doubt if I’d have accepted their offer of freedom while you were still a prisoner.  Perhaps now you can understand why what you said back then, in telling me that I wasn’t a prisoner, had upset me so much.**

-*-

**“You honestly think I’m not a prisoner?” I demanded. “That I wouldn’t want to go home to my father in Switzerland?”**

**“He wouldn’t want you back. Not after what you’ve done; what you’re doing.”**

**I could hear how angry you were, but speaking of my father like that was a low blow.**

**“I think you’ll find…” I hissed between gritted teeth, trying desperately not to hear Einar’s words predicting my father’s rejection reflected through your own. “…you’ll find that what I’m ‘doing’ is relieving your pain, so you’d be well advised not to insult the scientist with the syringe.”**

**Your face hardened.**

**I shook my head sadly. “I don’t know why you’re even wasting your breath on such pointless debates. You’re so much smarter than this. Save your energy,” I counselled. “You’ll simply wear off the analgesic.”**

**Having checked that the straps around you were still fully secure, I resumed the chair by your side. I’d seen what you could do with that arm, and had no intention of becoming the next victim.**

**You stared over at me, a look of undisguised contempt on your face, which was a shame, because your features don’t naturally frame into a grimace. I guess that’s why HYDRA gave you that damned mask to wear.**

**“You escaped once before, so naturally you’re hoping to do so again,” I explained. “But you must understand that this base is far too secure for you to affect any successful attempt by yourself. You’re simply going to have to wait.”**

**“Wait?”**

**“For rescue.”**

**“So, you _do_ expect me to be rescued?”**

**I sighed. “In all honesty, probably not. At least not from this facility, and certainly not any time soon. Right now, I’d imagine your comrades think you’re dead. All of them. Even your boyfriend.”**

**A furious blush colored your cheeks. We’d been in each other’s company often enough, but I’d never disclosed what I knew about you and Captain Rogers until now. I felt guilty about revealing it at all, but if you harbored any illusions that your boyfriend might rescue you, I had to smother them quickly before you did something foolish, as I had done on the way to Azzano. It was the only way I had left to convince you to wait for a better opportunity to escape.**

**I could only guess at your silence, but I suspected you were deciding whether to trust me or not, and that indecision had rendered you speechless. One thing was certain, you didn’t deny my words; you just shot me one of your angry stares, expecting me to melt under its glare.  I’d hurt you, and I knew it. But indulging your dreams of escape would have hurt you more, when it was clear that they were a dangerous fantasy. For now, Captain Rogers was far from you, but if I could keep you alive, perhaps one day he’d be close enough to rescue you again.**

Pausing the tape, Steve exhaled the breath he didn’t even know he’d been holding in and looked to his boyfriend.

“Buck?”

Bucky head hung low, his long hair obscuring his features.

“That’s…so damn hard to hear,” Bucky murmured.

“Sweetheart?”

“Back then, I never talked to anyone about my feelings ‘cept you, Stevie. Sure, it seems like me and Zola had some history by then, but although he wasn’t my enemy, it’s a fair bet he wasn’t my friend either.”

“These must have been real powerful emotions for you, Buck. Do you remember any of this?”

Bucky raised his head, looking into Steve’s eyes. “No, but I’m damn sure what I’d have been thinking at the time.”

“What?” Steve queried.

“I’d have been thinking that about how much I missed you, Stevie, and how I much I wanted you with me.”

Steve’s eyes welled with tears as he thought about the million times he’d missed Bucky after he’d fallen from the train. Bucky’s confirmation that he’d felt the same way made Steve’s heart ache. Steve enfolded Bucky in a tight embrace. “I wish I’d been there with you too, sweetheart,” he breathed into Bucky’s neck as they held each other.

At length, Bucky broke the silence. “I’m glad you weren’t,” he whispered. “Because by the sounds of it, we wouldn’t have got out alive. But I’m sure I missed your strength.”

Steve pulled back from his boyfriend, smiling through the tears. “I think you were probably stronger than you think, Buck.”

“How do you figure that, Stevie?”

“Because I’ve been on the wrong end of a good few of your angry stares.  And it’s pretty hard not to crack under them.”

Bucky returned a watery smile. “Well, you must be a darn sight softer than Zola then, at least given what he’s had to say so far.”

Bucky nodded to the machine, and Steve cautiously resumed the tape.

 

**“I’m sorry to embarrass you like that, Sergeant Barnes. I know about your feelings for Captain Rogers because you started confessing your love for him during the operation to attach your arm,” I explained. “I couldn’t shut you up, much as I wanted to, you just kept moaning his name over and over. Eventually, I managed to shoo the technicians off. I told them it was the effect of a new anesthetic I’d been working on. I’m not sure they bought the story entirely, but none of them dared disclose what they’d heard. I can be pretty intimidating when I have to be.”**

**“Who? You? A bespectacled bald midget in a bow tie?”**

**“Don’t let my looks fool you,” I advised. “You’ve no idea what I’m truly capable of. Anyway, by all accounts, your boyfriend didn’t used to be much of an oil painting either, but you still loved him back then, didn’t you?”**

**You chose to direct your angry glare up at the ceiling, finally acknowledging you were wasting it on me.**

**I couldn’t say I blamed you for that. Einar saw something in my face that he liked, I guess, but that was in my youth. Since then I hadn’t exactly aged well with my crumpled features and thinning hair.**

**My appearance had been even worse than that a few months earlier when I was still being forced to experiment on the prisoners in Azzano. With my broken heart buried alongside my husband, I no longer cared what I looked like. And so I choose to spare the prisoner’s suffering by injecting myself with the prototype serum instead, minus the active ingredient. The risk paid off but for the all too predictable side-effects. Though my forehead reddened almost as lividly as Schmidt’s entire devil-face, at least the effect was temporary and only a few stubborn weals remained.**

**If Schmidt had noticed the change in my appearance back then, he didn’t remark on it. He was too busy eyeing up the Azzano detainees like a fox prowling round a chicken coop. And as host to the now perfected serum he had personally selected a certain Sergeant J. B. Barnes, the only man who hadn’t cursed or begged when he was seized for my experiments; a man who had faced these unknown horrors with charismatic wisecracks and a deliciously wicked sense of humor.**

**Do you recall what you said to me when the guards were going through your possessions and I picked up your pistol?**

**“I’m so glad you’ve keeping my Colt M1911A1,” you had smiled, sweetly. “That version was specially modified for people like you, with small hands.”**

**“I’ve never fired a pistol in my life,” I’d admitted, uneasily.**

**“I’m happy to offer you lesson one for free,” you had quipped back. “Just put the muzzle in your mouth and squeeze the trigger.”**

**I couldn’t help but return that roguish grin of yours.**

Steve exchanged a meaningful glance with his boyfriend.

“Looks like you were right about that pistol all along,” Steve said.

“Of course I was right,” Bucky sniffed. “And Zola’s just repeated back exactly the kind of wisecrack I’m bound to have hit the guy with.”

“But I guess you didn’t know you’d said that to him?”

Bucky shook his head. “That’s not the only thing I didn’t know until now.”

“What do you mean?” Steve asked.

“Well, you see,” Bucky began, scratching his forehead in thought. “I kinda always figured I was just another prisoner in Azzano, but Zola’s saying that Schmidt actually chose me. I don’t know whether to thank him or curse him for that.”

Steve bit his lip. “I see what you mean, Buck. Schmidt choosing you for the serum put you in a whole world of pain, but it also made you valuable property to him. And, as we’ve heard, that was pretty much Schmidt’s only measure for keeping people alive.”

Bucky paused to let that thought sink in, before nodding for Steve to resume the tape.

 

**And even when Captain Rogers rescued you from the Azzano base, my dearest, I got the distinct impression that you were, in some unfathomable manner, also rescuing him at the same time.**

**I’d hoped that you had gone straight home, that you were safe. But you weren’t. And when the HYDRA agents located you in that ravine and brought you back to our truck convoy, I don’t mind telling you that I cried bitterly over your unconscious body once I’d staunched the bleeding and you were out of immediate danger.**

**Schmidt hadn’t chosen anyone else for the supersoldier serum following your rescue from Azzano, so my orders to administer it to you remained the same. I had no desire to turn you into HYDRA’s killing machine, but had Schmidt known of your altered state, I felt sure he would have reversed those orders and left you there to die. I knew his opinion of soldiers with missing arms all too well. Besides, your physical condition after the fall was so precarious that the active ingredient of the serum might have been the only thing capable of saving your life, even if it could lead to a fate worse than death.**

**I locked the serum away in the medical truck and dithered over the decision for days, but just as it looked like your health was beginning to recover, the Americans ambushed us and I was separated from you by my captivity.**

**I was almost glad that HYDRA succeeded in retrieving me a few days later. I’d been so worried about you. And it transpired I had good reason to be. The ham-fisted butchers that passed for doctors in the Kraków base hadn’t even bothered to treat the wound on your arm stump where the stitches had worked loose. Consequently you’d lost a great deal of blood, your pulse was racing and you’d become delirious. With no facilities for blood transfusions on the base, your life was in very real danger. My thoughts flooded back to Einar, the man whose life I hadn’t saved, and I was seized by a desperate need to give you the chance he never had.**

**The HYDRA base commander hadn’t been able to reach Schmidt, but he had a copy of Schmidt’s previous orders and insisted that I save your life and administer the serum.  I still harbored my concerns, but you were so gravely ill by then that it was impossible to save your life without using it anyway.**

**During your operation, when the anesthetic loosened your tongue and I heard your sweet words of love for Captain Rogers repeated like a mantra on your lips, I ordered the technicians away, and completed the attachment of the prosthesis alone. I could see the effect of the serum as I worked, repairing your damaged tissues and forming a bridge between flesh and metal, but I felt no triumph in my achievement, fearing the life I had condemned you to. My only consolation was the knowledge that HYDRA would consider you valuable enough to keep alive. And where there was life, there was hope of rescue, there was the hope of Captain Rogers coming back for you.**

**Did I do the right thing, my dearest? Or was I selfish to create a fellow prisoner, a companion to share my twilight world? When I wasn’t treating you, several agents on the base- doubtless following the lead of the Nazi ghetto guards - delighted in beating and cursing me after I requested the analgesic to relieve your pain. Having been denied that analgesic, and once you’d regained consciousness; you began to curse me as well.**

**However, though God had surely forsaken me, he smiled upon Herr Pankiewicz, and that brave chemist supplied the only comfort I had to offer you, my dearest. It was cold comfort given the circumstances, but better than no comfort at all.**

**At least the physical side of your recovery was an unqualified success. The strengthening and healing results of the serum, twinned with your Vibranium arm, had indeed saved your life. Better still, HYDRA hailed its success and no-one doubted your capability as the fearsome ‘Fist of HYDRA’.**

 

**You were safe.**

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Tadeusz Pankiewicz. Pankiewicz is another of the real-life characters in this story; and his own story is both fascinating and heart-breaking. When the Nazis created the Kraków Ghetto 1941, the Eagle pharmacy and its Polish owner Tadeusz Pankiewicz chose to stay. Pankiewicz and his staff were the only Poles allowed to live and work in the ghetto and over the two years of the ghetto's existence, the pharmacy became an important centre of social life as well as aid by acquiring food and medicine, falsifying documents and avoiding deportations. Pankiewicz (recognised today as one of the 'Righteous among the Nations') and his staff risked their lives in many clandestine operations while bearing witness to tragedy through the windows of the pharmacy as the ghetto and its 15,000 inhabitants were ultimately 'liquidated' during the 13th and 14th March 1943.
> 
> Tadeusz Pankiewicz 
> 
> To read more about Tadeusz Pankiewicz, please paste the following URL into your internet browser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Pankiewicz


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zola, imprisoned with Bucky at the HYDRA base in Kraków, hears some devastating news...

 

**Although I received the same casual brutality meted out to everyone in HYDRA’s captivity, the guards knew that their leader demanded regular updates on your status from me, so I was granted access to administrative areas on the base considered off-limits to other prisoners.  After the first few episodes of uncomfortable silence, the secretaries quickly grew accustomed to my visits and resumed their genial chats as if I wasn’t there.**

**I was obliged to them for that. Many of these women had husbands and sons forcibly conscripted into the German army, and letters from the front often told truths that made a mockery of the ridiculous pro-Nazi propaganda broadcasts I heard on the base at the time. I learned more about what was really going on in the world from their hushed conversations than anywhere else. My ears would prick up at any mention of Nazi defeat and I’d smile to myself over each and every setback that befell the sick ideology that had poisoned my husband’s mind with hate. Yet even so I felt no sense of triumph. I feared that most of those poor conscripts would join the ranks of soldiers destined to die on the orders of Hitler and his henchmen, and until they were finally defeated, the lives of countless millions hung precariously in the balance of fate.**

**Sometime later, I was reminded of just how precarious that balance was when the secretary’s conversations narrowed down from mass bomber raids to the fate of single pilot, and my heart ached at the tragic story they told each other. For once, it seemed the official propaganda and their more reliable information sources were in full agreement over the facts. One of them even dumped irrefutable proof of the whole dreadful incident into the wastepaper basket by my side.**

**And I don’t know about you, my dearest, but I’ve always found the uncensored contents of other people’s wastepaper baskets to be a highly revealing source of information.**

Bucky glanced over at Steve, who had the good grace to blush at his own hunt through Zola’s trash, given that he’d salvaged the very tape they were listening to.

**I stealthily retrieved this evidence, abandoned the last section of my report half-finished in the typewriter, and hurried over to your cell.**

 

**“Out, out, all of you,” I bawled at the technicians working on an enhancement to your arm. They skittered away like frightened rabbits.**

**“Sergeant Barnes, I…I need to you to promise me something.”**

**You shot me an incredulous look from your restraints. As if you owed me so much as the time of day.**

**That look might have easily discouraged me, but I cared about you too much to risk you being hurt hearing this from someone else.**

**“I need to tell you something that I guarantee will make you angry, but I want you to try not to turn violent or shout and scream at me too much. I really don’t want the guards to burst in because what I have to say is sensitive.”**

**“Then try me,” you grunted, drily.**

**I sighed, swaying on the balls of my feet, wary of getting too close to you.**

**“Steve Rogers is dead.”**

**I saw your jaw clench and your eyes flash, filling with anger. “You’re lying!”**

**“Somehow I knew you’d say that. I brought a copy of today’s newspaper to prove it.” I warily held the front page up to you. “Of course it’s in Polish, but the picture’s clear enough, and I can translate.”**

**Your hands tightened into fists and the metal cuffs restraining the Vibranium arm creaked ominously, but I knew they’d hold. “It’s a mock-up!” you yelled.**

**Losing patience with your obstinacy, I yelled back. “Oh, for pity’s sake, will you listen to me, Barnes? He’s dead – he flew to the North Pole and crashed himself into the ice. It’s all anyone can talk about. If you won’t believe me now, then I’m sure the guards will find an altogether more brutal way to convince you later.”**

**I swallowed hard; lowering my voice to a gentler tone I hoped would be more respectful to your feelings.**

**“Please, I…I beg you to try and understand what it is I’m trying to tell you. I came here as fast as I could because I’m aware of how you felt about Captain Rogers. I came here because I wanted you to have a decent chance to come to terms with all of this, before the guards arrive and subject you to their witless anti-American rhetoric. I’m so sorry, Sergeant Barnes, I really wish I didn’t have to say this to you… but…but your boyfriend is dead.”**

**I was expecting a volcano to blow, but it seemed I underestimated you, dearest. You have very strong emotions, but the good sense to control them. Your jaw shifted as your eyes darted from the newspaper to the floor, as if you were fighting with yourself. I could see that my words were slowly seeping in as you forced yourself to acknowledge that I simply wouldn’t bother bluffing about this.**

**Within minutes, the anger had faded, but instead of allowing grief to overtake you, you steeled yourself and proceeded like a fellow scientist, with rational enquiry.**

**“Why? Do they say why?”**

**Re-adjusting my spectacles, I scanned the newspaper again in the hope of answering your question.**

**“Not directly,” I admitted. “Although they do allude to a love affair with a British Fraulein named Carter. Does that make any sense to you?”**

**The look on your face told me in an instant that it did.**

**“So…it’s…it’s true.”**

“Buck?”

Steve paused the tape. Bucky hadn’t told him to, but he didn’t need words. The tears ran down Bucky’s cheeks as he stared desperately at Steve.

“My…my Stevie,” Bucky gasped, through shuddering breaths. “I thought I’d lost you.”

“You remember?”

“Just…just bits and pieces,” Bucky said. “The picture in the newspaper, being tied down, feeling like my world was falling apart at the seams.”

Before Steve could swing over to Bucky’s couch, Bucky staggered over to Steve, his arms blindly searching for comfort.

“Oh God, Bucky…Bucky, sweetheart, I’m so, so sorry,” Steve whispered into Bucky’s ear as he hugged his boyfriend, repeating it like a mantra as he rocked them back and forth, circling his palm over Bucky’s back.

It took a couple of minutes for Bucky’s tears to dry. He pulled back a little from their embrace.

“What did you say sorry for just then, Stevie?”

“I…I shouldn’t have gone chasing after HYDRA agents. I should have gone looking for you.”

Bucky’s face turned stern. “Now, we’ve been through all that tons of times before, Rogers. You couldn’ta known I was still alive.”

“But you wouldn’t have ever given up, Buck. You’d have kept looking.”

Bucky paused for a moment to consider that. “Well maybe I would, and maybe I wouldn’t. I figure we’ll never know, but let’s not make things worse by guessing.”

Steve sighed. “You’re right; we’ll never know what would have happened had things turned out different. I just can’t stop feeling bad about this.”

“Things turned out well in the end, didn’t they?” Bucky smiled softly, combing a hand through Steve’s golden hair.

“Yeah…yeah I guess they turned out just fine, Buck.”

“You _guess,_ huh? _”_ Bucky snorted. “Rogers, what did I just tell you about guesswork?”

“Smartass,” murmured Steve with a glowing smile he couldn’t contain. “You know, you’re too smart for your own good, Barnes. Even Zola said so.”

Bucky shook his head. “Then you’re both wrong, ya punk.”

“Jerk,” Steve responded.

Bucky’s amused expression gradually faded. “Listen Stevie…can I stay on the couch with you for a bit?” Bucky asked tentatively. “I just get the feeling the difficult bit of this tape ain’t finished yet.”

“Sure you can, Buck. You sure you wanna keep listening now?”

Bucky nodded. Steve felt his boyfriend snuggle tight against him as he started the tape whirring again.

 

**I glanced down at you, embarrassed to be staring at your anguish for a moment longer. “I…I hope you’d have learned enough about me to appreciate I wouldn’t deliberately lie in order to hurt you, Sergeant Barnes.”**

**“Bucky.”**

**“Sorry?”**

**“Call me Bucky. Just…just don’t tell anyone else you call me that, okay?”**

**I shrugged good-naturedly. It was testament to your fortitude in the teeth of suffering that you’d allowed me into your confidence at such a painful moment.**

**“So, what do I do now?”**

**I was considering taking the chair by your side. Obviously you hadn’t turned violent as I’d feared. Perhaps that would…**

**No.**

**No, that simply wasn’t going to be enough. I needed to demonstrate that if you showed your vulnerability, then I could reciprocate to the same degree.**

**Wordlessly, I undid the straps around you.**

**You looked up at me like a caged tiger suddenly released, and unsure of what to do next.**

**“Do you wish to stand up?”**

**You nodded.**

**I helped to guide you up. Naturally, once on your feet you towered over me. Even though I felt in my heart that you wouldn’t hurt me, I can’t pretend that I didn’t feel scared.**

**And I think you could sense that.**

**That’s why you sat back down on the bed, cradling your head in your hands. Free of the restraints, your emotions burst out from you in torrents like a breached dam. I stood guard quietly by your side for several minutes whilst your shoulders shook from the anguished weeping, until the sobbing finally died down.**

**“What do I do?” You repeated the plea, your voice hoarse from the crying.**

**“What do you want to do?”**

**“Mourn.”**

**“There’s no grave at the North Pole.”**

**“Remember, then.”**

**Tentatively I sat beside you. “That’s…that’s good. Remembering is good.”**

**“Is it?” You said. “Maybe I’d do better to forget.”**

**I laid my little fat palm reassuringly onto your enormous flesh hand and a flashback of holding hands with dearest Einar in our happier times together rushed unbidden to my thoughts. It was not altogether as unwelcome an apparition as I’d feared.**

**“Bucky, when we get older, all sorts of memories start to build up. Sometimes they bring joy, and sometimes they bring pain; mostly they’re a mixture of both. Does remembering Captain Rogers distress you?”**

**You lowered your head. “I loved my Stevie for years, more than anyone in the world. And a whole lot more than Peggy Carter ever did,” you muttered bitterly. “It ain’t right that you’re not reading about me ‘n my Stevie.”**

**“Your anger is understandable,” I conceded. “But you shouldn’t be angry at Captain Rogers for what the press printed without his consent.”**

**“I’m not angry at him. In fact I…I can’t really say I’m angry at all,” you clarified. “I guess I’m just upset that her name appears in the newspaper and not mine.”**

**I gave the newspaper story a final cursory glance. “Considering the circumstances, I guess it would have been…expedient for the great American public to learn that their national hero was leaving behind the customary weeping widow, even if the truth was very different.”**

**“That’s not even an American newspaper,” you pointed out.**

**“True enough, but if American propaganda suits Nazi purposes, they’ll be happy enough to print it.” I shrugged.**

**Your expression softened by degrees to a deep simmering resentment. “It’s all phony, that’s what it is,” You grumbled.**

**“Such is propaganda,” I said.**

**“Is that something they taught you in this prison of ours?”**

**“No,” I sighed, my mind’s eye fixed on another ‘national hero’, this one staring out of a Nazi recruitment poster. “I learned my lessons about propaganda long before HYDRA.”**

**You closed your eyes and swallowed hard.**

**A pregnant pause developed. I wasn’t sure whether to withdraw and let you digest the news, or stay and be supportive, even if that risked angering you. In the end, I thought a dash of dark humor might be the most appropriate tonic.**

**“But to answer your question about what HYDRA’s taught me,” I said, breaking the silence. “I was going to remark that my captivity here has never taught me anything, but that would be doing this fine organization a disservice. For example, did you know it’s a very good place to learn new languages? If you can’t ask for your dinner in the tongue of whichever country you’ve been transferred to, then they’ll happily leave you to starve.”**

**When you reopened your eyes, the grim line of your mouth crept into a care-worn smile.**

**“We’re around each other too much, Herr Doctor,” you huffed.**

**I nodded and returned that smile, causing your smile to widen. The look that passed between us was very precious, my dearest. You were tentatively offering me your trust, and my heart ached in my chest because I knew so well the torment you were going through, feeling so abandoned and alone right then.**

**“You know…” I started out, tentatively. “I don’t know if this helps, but I…I do understand a little, I might be able to help you to come to terms with all of this.”**

**A flash of irritation sparkled in your eyes. “No, no you don’t,” you snorted. “You just can’t. How could you _possibly_ understand the kind of pain I’m going through?”**

**I looked away, recollections of my doomed marriage suddenly overwhelming me.**

**“Herr Doctor? I’m…I’m sorry.”**

**Your unnecessary apology made me turn back. You’d done nothing wrong beyond stirring some painful memories you had no knowledge of. Twenty years before, under the chandeliers of a Swedish library, the pleading eyes of a young man had compelled me to answer him. The look in your eyes was very different, but equally insistent. Gone was the heat of Einar’s sexual desire and in its place hovered the concern of someone who genuinely cared about me.**

**The shock of seeing your expression prompted me to continue my confession. I couldn’t withhold the hope you needed in your grief. The hope that you weren’t entirely alone down there.**

**“I was just remembering,” I assured you. “Please believe me what I say you weren’t the cause of it.”**

**“Remembering hurts, doesn’t it?”**

**I nodded. “It hurts when the propaganda says you shouldn’t remember things the way you do. You remember Captain Rogers in a special way, a way quite different from the lies printed in that newspaper. And despite the Nazi lies, I can remember my husband too.”**

**“Your…your husband?” You gasped.**

**“When I was a young man,” I began. “I fell in love with another young man. We were married and we both lived together for many years.”**

**Your eyes flashed with sudden hope. “You did? And you…you really got married?”**

**I smiled and nodded. “Oh yes, gold wedding rings and everything.”**

**“So you _do_  believe me, when I say how much my Stevie meant to me?”**

**“I think that I do, Bucky. Yes.”**

**Your eyes widened in wonder. When I was a little boy, I imagined my own dear father to be some kind of superhero. It was truly disconcerting to note your gaze resembled mine back then, particularly when I didn’t deserve such adulation.**

**As the guilt seeped into my smile, you detected the change instantly.**

**“Did it…not end well?” you asked, tentatively, squeezing my hand gently.**

**“No, no it didn’t,” I replied quietly. “He stopped loving me…when he joined the Nazis.”**

**I wasn’t going to add the justification. I didn’t deserve for you to think highly of me, my dearest. Not after what I’d done.**

**Your eyes flashed with anger, but for once the anger wasn’t directed at me. “Fuckin’ Nazis,” you spat. “They always ruin everything. If it wasn’t for the Nazis I’d still be in Brooklyn with Steve.”**

**“I’m sorry you have to be here, Bucky,” I said, and I meant it.**

**My observation made your angry look soften momentarily, before the storm clouds re-gathered as you demanded, “So, what did this Nazi bastard do? Dump you for another Nazi? Betray you so you ended up down here with me?”**

**“No, no, nothing like that. He, that is to say I, I….I…,” my voice stuttered to a halt. Suddenly my bow tie began to choke the air out of me just as it had done when Schmidt had demanded his answers. It wasn’t the same situation at all of course, but I suddenly felt just as trapped. If I’d tried explaining my husband’s denial of me to Schmidt, it would just have been another stalling tactic. I’d stalled long enough before when I’d hesitated to give the order that condemned Einar to death. But in the end, I _had_ given that order and no amount of excuses for my actions could wipe his blood from my hands.**

**I squeezed my eyes shut against the horrible truth. Even then, the specter of Schmidt’s cruel face slipped in like a wraith, grinning at me obscenely; coaxing me to say those words to him out loud.**

**I’d murdered my husband. I had ordered his death.  I, Zola, and no-one else. I was the monster who’d had him killed, I had him killed, I had him killed…**

**“I had him killed,” I exhaled, without even realizing I’d betrayed myself once more.**

**“You had him _killed_?”**

**Your shocked reaction didn’t last more than a few seconds. Then your eyes steadily narrowed, and your jaw set firm. “No… I don’t believe that for a moment. You don’t really mean that.”**

**I swallowed hard.**

**“You’re bluffing.”**

**I looked away, unable to respond.**

**“Tell me how he died, then,” you demanded. “If you really killed him, you’d tell me without hesitating; without having to cook something up.”**

**I answered you with a second helping of silence. I couldn’t possibly give you those details, even though I knew them off by heart. Schmidt had delighted in telling me the lurid details of how Einar, half-mad with fever from a burgeoning infection in his arm stump, groaned and thrashed impotently against his restraints as the poisoned needle punctured his flesh.**

**Your voice grew quieter, more tentative. “I don’t believe you. I know you, Herr Doctor. You’re not capable of…of that.”**

**You were right, and you knew it. I wasn’t capable of that. Despite Schmidt’s overblown assertions, I was no Shakespearean Richard III, cackling with theatrical villainy. But by the same token, murdering your husband wasn’t exactly accepted matrimonial protocol either, whatever the pretext. Einar was dead by my order, just as you were now suffering by my silence. I cared about you, dearest, and seeing the pain I was causing you was more than I could bear, so I screwed my eyes shut to it.**

**At length, your reason twisted as desperately as your tone of voice. “If you…if you _did_  kill him then…you…you  _had_ to do it, didn’t you? It was either you or him? Wasn’t it? Tell me you didn’t have a choice, damn it!” The sharp staccato of your questions hacked into my blackened soul.**

**It would have given you great comfort if I could have agreed with you that it was Einar or me, dearest, but that simply wasn’t true. Without Einar’s protection, I was dangerously exposed of course, but Schmidt’s offer had deliberately sidestepped that danger. I had a choice. I either ordered Einar’s reasonably swift death or remained silent, leaving him to suffer protracted agony in a concentration camp. Schmidt’s offer of safety, which I’d forfeited by my subsequent escape attempt, had been entirely separate.**

**But why did any of this even matter? I was hurting you by not explaining how Schmidt had manipulated me into ordering Einar’s death. Surely my confession would have reassured you.**

**Or would it? You were very intelligent. Surely you’d have probed me with further questions until you’d got to the truth. The truth that no matter how much pressure Schmidt had exerted upon me, in the end I had killed Einar of my own free will. And then you would have despised me all the more.**

**You’d said I didn’t have a choice, but you were wrong. I did have a choice…of sorts. And as I agonized over that detail, a sudden clarity arose, like a flash of lightening on a dark night. You’d already provided the perfect solution to my problem back when you had tried to persuade me to escape. If I laid the dots out like you had for me, then I knew you’d join them up and come to a logical conclusion. Perhaps that was the way - the only way - I could attempt an honest explanation of my crime.**

**“I did have a choice,” I replied, guardedly. “I could ask for my husband’s quick death or leave him to die slowly.”**

**“But…but that’s not a choice at all,” you spluttered in exasperation. “Who in the hell would…”**

**You stopped short, your searing flare of anger rapidly cooling.**

**“No,” you sighed. “You…you don’t have to answer that. I’ve seen more than enough sadists in this hellhole just itching to paint a guy into a corner like that. But...but can’t you see you were put in that position on purpose? To make it seem like it was you who killed him?”**

**“But I did kill him. I ordered his death,” I pointed out.**

**“No, you didn’t. He was dead already. All you did was take the best choice you’d been offered. I guess by comparison, it was a good one.”**

**My expression soured. “I fail to see what was so good about it.”**

**“It was good that he died quickly,” you hastily clarified. “You loved him, so you didn’t want him to suffer.”**

**Did I love Einar towards the end? I suppose I did. But that didn’t stop him suffering. Schmidt’s chilling description of Einar’s not-so quick death resounded in my ears, threatening to shout down all appeal to reason.**

**I’m quite sure you could read my pained expression, because you continued: “You’re looking at this all the wrong way, Herr Doctor. You can’t fix a one-sided deal with science.”**

**My thoughts snapped back to Einar’s mockery of my inadequate common sense. My failure to reach an agreement with Schmidt that could have saved his life only seemed to confirm the futility of my scientific abilities. In the depths of my despair, I betrayed my darkest fears to you.  “I should have been smart enough to reach a compromise,” I grumbled. “I tried bargaining. I tried so very hard…but I failed, and my husband paid the price for my failure.”**

**The tone of your voice softened with sympathy. “You can’t strike a deal with a madman. I know you want to, but you really shouldn’t blame yourself for that. If everyone was happy to bargain and compromise, then I wouldn’t be stranded halfway around the world right now, from fighting in a war I hadn’t started.”**

**You spoke the truth about the war, my dearest. Fate had been so cruel to you. If only you’d given up fighting after Steve rescued you from Azzano, you could have settled down with him and lived a truly happy life back home in America. Instead, you were chained down here with another man who had lost his one true love. But though I pitied your fate, I felt entirely certain that I deserved my own.**

**“You’re not convinced, are you? You’re still blaming yourself,” you concluded, as I fixed my gaze firmly to the floor. “**

**I nodded. “You weren’t responsible for Steve’s death. I loved my husband yet I chose to have him killed. What kind of a monster does that make me?”**

**“You’re not a monster,” you protested, hotly. “You said it yourself, you had no choice.”**

**“But I did have a choice,” I countered.**

**“Yes, you did,” you conceded. “But, it wasn’t a real choice, was it? With a real choice you get different results, and though your husband’s level of suffering might have been different, the result of your choice was gonna be the same either way.”**

**“You don’t seem to understand,” I explained irritably. “If I’d loved Einar the way you loved Steve, then I would have found another way; a different way.”**

**“You tried that by bargaining, but there wasn’t anything you could do. That deal was completely one-sided. You couldn’t change that.”**

**“I bet you could have,” I shot back, angrily. “I’m sure if the boot had been on the other foot, and Steve’s life was in danger, you’d have found a way to save him.”**

**I wasn’t sure how you’d respond to my outburst, but what you actually did took me by surprise. After an evident grunt of agreement, the corner of your mouth creased into a cheeky half-smile. “I reckon I’d have tried to find a way for sure. I don’t have your scientific brains, Herr Doctor, but I got me some…other weapons,” you grinned wider.**

**“Seduction?”**

**“My dear doctor, what do you take me for?” you gasped in mock offence. “Charm is a far more effective way of getting folks to do what you want.”**

**I couldn’t help but grin right back. Just like you’d done before with that little quip about teaching me to shoot myself with your pistol, you’d let me share a shimmering fragment of your innermost thoughts. It helped me recall the happy times I’d had with Einar, before the Nazis stole the joy from my soul and the love from his heart. You had some much life left to give, my dearest, and it grieved me to think you no longer had Steve to share it with.**

**Your smile gradually subsided. “But I guess I’ll never know if I could have charmed my way into some kind of deal. And I guess…I guess it doesn’t matter anyway. Steve’s gone, and there’s nothing that either of us can do to bring back the dead. We only have our memories left to draw on.”**

**“Our memories,” I echoed.**

**You nodded. “From what you’ve told me, I don’t believe you murdered your husband, not for one minute. But in the end, that ain’t my call. Those memories are yours. You’ll remember him the way you want to, and I’ll remember…I’ll remember…my…my Stevie….”**

**Your voice cracked in despair as you turned away from me, your shoulders heaving as you poured out your undiluted grief.**

**“Bucky?” I ventured, but my words were hopelessly lost in the weeping.**

**After a few minutes, you gathered yourself together and turned back to me, stony faced. “Maybe what we both need right now is to take a break from our memories,” you sniffled, wiping away the last of the tears. “The pain in my arm is coming back and…and I…I want to forget.”**

**I swallowed hard. “I understand. Would you like to lay back down for me, please?”**

**You nodded and, with a little assistance from Pankiewicz’s pharmacy, I helped you settle into a dull dreamless sleep.**

**Was I right to talk about Einar, when your grief over Steve was still so fresh? I really don’t know. We shared the experience of lost love, but we differed in our attitudes to it. You were adamant that I hadn’t killed Einar but, despite all your efforts, I couldn’t ever absolve myself of his murder.**

**Nor could I absolve myself from my guilt over our conversation. You’d tried to help me, but I really hadn’t helped you. All I’d done was dredge up painful memories; memories that both of us had wanted to forget.**

**I’m so sorry that I failed you, my dearest.**

 

Steve paused the tape. For several minutes no words were spoken. They weren’t needed any more. Instead, their grip tightened on each other. 

“I’m sorry you had to grieve alone down there. I’m sorry I made you cry, sweetheart,” Steve whispered close to Bucky’s ear.

Steve could feel Bucky shake his head. “You ain’t got nothing to be sorry about, Stevie. We were all dealt rotten hands, all three of us.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean what I told Zola just now,” Bucky said. “He couldn’t save Einar, you couldn’t save me, and I couldn’t save you. We all thought we’d failed. That somehow we could have done more.”

“But I could have done more. I could have gone back to look…”

“Yes, I know,” Bucky cut in gently. “You wished you’d looked harder for me.  Zola wished he’d bargained harder to save Einar, and I wish you’d both seen a bit of sense back then. There ain’t nothing else either of you could have done.”

“You…you really think that?” Steve pulled away a little, catching a full view of Bucky’s determined expression.

“I love you, Stevie. I’ve always loved you and I’ll always love you. You mustn’t ever blame yourself for things you didn’t know about at the time. Zola was right about one thing, everyone thought I was dead: even my boyfriend. Somehow I stayed alive, I don’t know how or why as yet, but I’m mighty glad I did, because now we’re together again. Finally we’ve been dealt a winning hand, and I ain’t ever gonna take that for granted, Stevie. We got another chance to be happy, didn’t we?”

Steve nodded, flashing a watery smile. “Buck, I love you so, so much. But that doesn’t stop my heart aching knowing there was no-one to comfort you down there when you thought I was dead. You were alone in your grief.”

“But I wasn’t alone, I had Zola.”

“You just heard him, Buck,” Steve protested. “He told us he’d failed you.”

Bucky shook his head. “He didn’t fail. Not…not really. At least I knew there was someone else who had lost the love of his life, and though we were different kinds of people, I’m pretty sure he understood deep down. He wasn’t like those HYDRA guards. He wasn’t heartless. He was just…well…heartbroken, I guess.”

“And you knew what that felt like too, huh?” Steve said.

“We all knew what that felt like,” Bucky agreed. “You and me…and Zola. Maybe we weren’t all that different from each other after all.” He concluded, with a wry smile.

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zola loses his youth. Bucky loses his mind. And an old dictator must be dealt with…

 

**_**Moscow, Soviet Union 1953** _ **

**“Who was that, Herr Doctor?”**

**“Who do you mean?” I asked, gently wiping the splattered blood off your face with my silk spotted handkerchief.**

**“That man everyone else was being so careful around? He didn’t look happy.”**

**“Oh…” I looked around. “That was just Stalin.”**

**The obscene leader of the Soviet Union had grown old. Old and fat, and unbearably cantankerous. He wanted to see you, but naturally he refused point blank to travel to our base in Siberia. We had to cart all our apparatus over just to visit him.**

**For an entire hour he watched dispassionately as you disposed of a couple of dozen notorious assassins drawn from the Soviet secret police. It was a spectacle I wish I hadn’t been forced to witness, but at least I could content myself with the knowledge that the mission assigned to you that day had spared the lives of their future victims. In the final analysis, this was all pointless barbarity of course, sound and fury for Stalin’s sick amusement, but human life was cheap enough in Soviet Russia back then. All in all, it was a bleak and joyless excursion for both of us: no chit-chat, no vodka, and absolutely no sight-seeing.**

**After HYDRA’s brutal imposition of the ‘chair’ on you, our relationship had changed, but also stayed the same. I was relieved that the agonizing grief you’d suffered in Kraków seemed mostly forgotten, but I became increasingly fearful that HYDRA’s crude technology had the potential to cause you irreversible brain damage over the longer term. After some furtive tinkering, I engineered a method of weakening the intensity of the direct current. I suspect my sabotage succeeded, because when you returned from your missions you seemed to remember me a little, in that you always came back to me to patch you up.**

**But over time, much of your memory inevitably faded and died. Although the mind wipes filled me with dread, and you’d fought against it too once you understood HYDRA’s plans, to begin with you’d been surprisingly philosophical about the prospect of forgetting. “Life is painful…” you told me pointedly. “But simpler when you don’t have to think about it too much.”**

**“But your identity,” I protested.**

**“The only thing I ever loved is dead,” you’d replied, dejectedly. “And the pain of remembering ain’t getting any easier for me. I’m guessing you of all people can appreciate what those kinda memories feel like, Herr Doctor.”**

 

“Stevie?”

Bucky leaned over to slip the Dictaphone out of Steve’s shaking hands, pressing the pause button.

“I…I can’t believe I did that to you, Buck. I nearly lost you to those mind wipes but it sounds like losing me hurt you so bad you actually wanted them to begin with. You…oh God…” Steve shuddered.

Bucky slipped onto Steve’s couch, placing his arm around his boyfriend’s shoulders.

“Hey…hey…shhhhh, Stevie, you know that ain’t true. I don’t remember none of this, but you ain’t responsible for not finding me. We’ve been through all that.”

“But the effect it had on you…” he sniffled.

“You didn’t do it, Steve, I did it to myself,” said Bucky, firmly, pressing a chaste kiss to Steve’s cheek. “It was a dumb move, wanting to lose my memory like that. And there was you sayin’ I was smart.”

“You are smart, Bucky,” Steve protested.

Bucky shook his head. “Maybe sometimes I’m smart, and sometimes I’m not. Maybe sometimes I make real rash choices. I guess that was one of them.”

“You were smart enough to go to Zola to get fixed up.”

“I don’t remember any of that, Steve, but yeah, I guess that was a smart move.”

Bucky handed back the Dictaphone and nodded for Steve to continue.

**I didn’t want you to forget everything, but I couldn’t fault your reasoning. Losing your true love is bad, having him executed on your orders still worse. Every year I’d grown older, and fatter, and more cantankerous, just like Stalin; a monster twisted inside and out by my crimes, while you retained your youth, your vigor and, for the most part, your sublime innocence; even when you were calmly wading ankle-deep in the blood of your victims.**

**After returning to base, and before the mind wipe, there were still times you’d cry out for your ‘Stevie’, as if he were the painted saint of untold miracles. I think that’s why you preferred your impotent pleas to reach my ears to that of a stranger. At least you sensed I understood. I would gently place my hand on your shoulder or your chest and you’d whimper with the distant memory of a long-forgotten pleasure.**

**It never ever went beyond that, you understand, my dearest. I loved you as a father loves his son; as my father loved me. You were a child once more and, though I am a monster, I am no abuser of children, no matter how big they are. But the more you craved the comfort of your boyfriend’s arms, the more I feared that the others might take advantage of your vulnerability in the cruelest way.  And I’d risk anything to protect you from that danger.**

**It was around this time that a coded HYDRA transmission offered me curt condolences on the death of my father, who they’d been covertly monitoring on Schmidt’s orders for years. I don’t mind telling you, dearest, that I shed bitter tears at the news. Every attempt to reach him, even by letter, just to let him know that I was alive, had been repeatedly denied by HYDRA.  I had betrayed my father in the worst way, by never coming home to him; by abandoning him. But my grief also stiffened my resolve. I was never going to betray you. I was never going to abandon you…my…my son.”**

 

Steve read Bucky’s despondent sigh, and paused the tape.

 **“** Okay,” Bucky said quietly. “I’m starting to get why he’s calling me ‘dearest’.  And it’s not creepy. At least, not anymore.”

Steve nodded.

“He’d become my father figure, my protector,” Bucky continued. “He just wanted me to be safe. I…I”

As Bucky lowered his head, Steve gently stroked his hand.

“What is it, Buck? Please tell me how you’re feeling.”

“I feel ashamed, Steve,” he whispered hoarsely. “For years I’ve been cursing Zola as a heartless monster when he was the one watching my back down there.”

“You couldn’t possibly have known what Zola had done for you back then, Buck. Your mind had been wiped so many times. None of that’s your fault.”

“But don’t you see? It _was_ my fault, or at least some of it. I’d welcomed those mind wipes at the start, because I didn’t want to deal with the grief of losing you no more. But I hadn’t thought it through.  Zola had to pick up the pieces and protect me from HYDRA, because I couldn’t protect myself any longer. I was pretty much out of my mind, so I guess I never thanked him for looking out for me. It’s the knowing I never said nuthin’ to him that hurts the most.”

“Even if you had, I don’t think Zola would have believed a word you said,” Steve counseled gently, shaking his head. “He’d convinced himself he was a monster by then.”

“But he wasn’t a monster,” Bucky lamented. “He was just…well, he was just an old man who tried his best to care for me because his father had died and he didn’t have no one else left in the world.”

“I feel just as bad, Buck. Neither of us could have known what Zola was like before now.”

Steve’s mind flashed back to some more of Schmidt’s choice words, when he coolly observed that Zola would never be a father. Well, the Nazi was wrong. Zola was becoming a loving and caring father for Bucky, and Steve was grateful to him for that at least.

“Of course, we still don’t know if Zola was able to keep you safe,” Steve warned.

“I’m still here ain’t I, Stevie?”

Steve arched his eyebrow at Bucky. “That’s jumping to conclusions, isn’t it?”

“Which is why we need to keep listening,” Bucky replied.

Steve took the hint.

**I’d put Einar to ‘sleep’ when I should have cared for him, but sometimes life gives us a second chance, doesn’t it, dearest?**

**HYDRA put you to ‘sleep’ too, but it was a different kind of sleep; they preserved your strength and your beauty, until you were needed again, for a mission or – in this case – a floor show for a murderous megalomaniac.**

**Speaking of megalomaniacs, it was around this time that it finally occurred to me that Schmidt’s lack of communication wasn’t mere obstinacy.**

**To be fair, previous reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated so for many years no-one dared confirm it. Even once HYDRA started to infiltrate the fledgling SHIELD organization, the only evidence for Schmidt’s demise was on the word of Steve Rogers, the man who had apparently died alongside him. I recognized this kind of ‘convenient coincidence’ from previous HYDRA operations, and didn’t trust the rumors flying through the HYDRA bases they shipped us around back then.**

**I hadn’t trusted the word of Colonel Philips during my time as his ‘guest’ either. It's never a good idea to put your faith in your captors, as you and I know only too well, my dearest. But still, his charming Americanism was probably the most appropriate insult for Schmidt. In the dying days of the war, he truly was ‘nuts’. That Shakespeare-quoting Nazi may have cast me as Richard III, but in the end, his insanity easily surpassed King Lear.**

**But then, surely you had to be more than a touch insane to think HYDRA was an organization worth joining, much less leading.**

**Philips’ offer of pardon and reunion with my father in Switzerland had been tempting, but I’ll never know if that was genuine because I never got the chance to take it. Instead HYDRA’s rescue attempt succeeded, and I was consigned to a lifetime of captivity. I may have been a forced laborer, but caring for you became a labor of love to me, if they did but know it.  And if I could never see my father again, I could at least protect you, my son.**

“That’s so sad,” Bucky murmured, as Steve paused the tape. “Even when he was still alive, Zola wasn’t able to go back to his father, so he put all his efforts into looking after me.”

“He couldn’t trust HYDRA to do it.” Steve said, “And I can’t say I blame him. To be honest,” he sighed, “And you won’t hear me say this very often, but I think he was right not to trust the Americans either.”

“But that’s the second time he’s mentioned Colonel Philips and that offer to send him back to Switzerland,” Bucky protested. “If he’d been free to go home then, he’d still have had some time to be reunited with his father before he died.” Bucky’s expression changed, as he saw the doubtful expression on Steve’s face. “What? Do you think Philips would have broken his promise?”

“Not necessarily” Steve answered, cautiously “But though I never really knew Philips well, we both know SHIELD only too well. If they’d captured a scientist with Zola’s level of genius, do you think they’d have just let him go free?”

“So, SHIELD would have put Zola behind bars?”

“If the US judicial system had got a hold of him, he’d have fared a lot worse than a prison cell. As far as our courts were concerned, he’d been complicit in the abduction, torture and murder of hundreds of American and Allied POWs, including you. Given the extent of his crimes, no lawyer on earth could have convinced a judge to be lenient when passing sentence. He’d have swung from the gallows for sure.”

“But Zola was  _made_  to do it. He didn’t deserve to die for that,” Bucky protested hotly.

Steve nodded, thankful for his boyfriend’s scientific mind. Presented with fresh facts, he was rapidly re-evaluating his opinion of a man he’d said had ‘deserved to die’ only a few days before.

“If SHIELD had intervened, there’s a fair chance he’d have been spared the death penalty,” Steve conceded. “But he’d have been made to work for them in chains while he was serving his time. And it wouldn’t have been any kind of a short stretch, that’s for sure.” Steve snorted bitterly “The only real difference between a SHIELD prison and a HYDRA prison is that with HYDRA at least he was chained alongside you, Buck.”

“But with SHIELD, wouldn’t he have been free to travel to Switzerland once he’d been released?”

Steve looked doubtful. “If he’d applied for a travel pass to SHIELD, they’d have most likely blocked his application. They’d have questioned his motives, afraid the trip would have just been an excuse for him to sneak back to the HYDRA bases in Europe. And that’s assuming he’d have even been released before his father died.”

Bucky pondered that for a few moments, before exclaiming excitedly, “But in that case, why didn’t he just go to Switzerland while he was working for…”

Bucky’s voice halted abruptly. He shoulders seemed to sag as if all his enthusiasm had suddenly drained out of him. Steve didn’t need to ask what his boyfriend was thinking, because up until a few hours ago, Steve too had assumed Zola was an agent of HYDRA, instead of its prisoner. Zola might have been geographically closer to his father under HYDRA than if he’d been in SHIELD’s custody, but it was inconceivable that HYDRA would have granted Zola the comfort of visiting his father, given the risk that he might have made another escape attempt.

Swallowing hard, Bucky concluded shakily, “So, he’d have never seen Switzerland or his father again, no matter what he’d done?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Steve said.

Bucky heaved out a heavy sigh.  “It’s just not fair. But I need to know how this ends for him. Let’s keep going.”

Steve pressed the ‘play’ button.

 

**The thing was though, without Schmidt at the helm, the organization he led fell out of love with a lot of his former projects, and that included the feared ‘Fist of HYDRA’.  Of course there was some tinkering around your edges; the ubiquitous mask, rechristening you the ‘Winter Soldier’, labelling you an ‘asset’ and adding those absurd trigger words, ostensibly designed to send you into a pre-arranged frenzy in case you ever grew sluggish after re-activation. Whoever came up with that bright idea obviously had a lot of trouble getting out of bed in the morning, which – bearing in mind how damn cold Siberian mornings could be – wasn’t all that surprising.**

**Their worst idea of all was applying the bizarre red star to your shoulder. That cheap cosmetic trick was fat old Stalin’s proposal; a ridiculous piece of propaganda, which only served to remind me of Einar’s repeated insistence that I always wore my Swastika armband in public.**

**But really, it was all bows, face masks and fancy wrapping paper to fool people into thinking the same basic product was somehow new and improved. When I protested there wasn’t anything wrong with things as they were, I was laughed at almost indulgently and ignored as always, when my opinions conflicted with those of my captors.**

**Still, I’d discovered that questioning the way things were, without Schmidt’s malign influence, occasionally produced positive results.  Sometimes I found myself pushing at an open door. Although HYDRA may have been losing interest, Stalin - mollified by the red star gimmick - considered you something very special. Special enough to veto all discussion of using the serum on other test subjects. At what amounted to an impromptu interrogation by some flint-faced Soviet officials during our visit to Moscow, I’d tentatively suggested that the very threat of the Winter Soldier was enough to keep enemies of the state in line, in the hope they’d persuade HYDRA to reduce the number of your missions. I’d half-expected the room to be bugged, but what I hadn’t expected was that Stalin himself would be the one listening in. Deeply paranoid that an army of HYDRA supersoldiers could be turned against him, the great dictator used my words to justify not only mothballing the ‘Fist of HYDRA’ program, but – to my indescribable joy – what amounted to your semi-retirement.  Lacking effective leadership at that time, HYDRA raised no objection. Consequently your annual body count steadily dwindled to single figures by the mid 1950’s. It still wasn’t good enough of course. You shouldn’t have been used as a weapon against anyone, but my relief that you had fewer missions had blinded me to the hidden danger those missions still posed for you. By Stalin’s edict, the steady build-up of trauma might have slowed, but it hadn’t stopped.**

 

**And in time I would discover just how dangerous such trauma could be for you, my dearest...**

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zola takes a risk; Bucky tastes freedom…and some happy memories.

**_ **Sopot, Soviet-bloc Poland 1963** _ **

 

**Early that February, something went horrendously wrong on a mission. By chance, it was the early hours of the morning when you staggered back, bleeding and badly traumatized, so at least there were precious few guards about to witness it. Not as if I took the slightest notice of their shrill mockery, as I ushered you into the sick bay.**

**I was awake of course. I’d stayed awake every minute since the day you left. I could never get any rest while I knew you were in danger.**

**“Stevie, Stevie…where are you?” you wailed, as I bathed your wounds.**

**I toyed with the idea of impersonation, but I couldn’t add dishonesty to your distress.**

**There had been a brutal crackdown on captives calling you by your real name the year before. One of the technicians had been executed for ‘confusing the asset’, as they called it.  I might have dodged that particular bullet by calling you ‘Bucky’, but referring to your past life risked you confusing me with Steve. All the same, in your hour of need, I couldn’t possibly call you the ‘asset’. In my attempt to comfort you, I resorted to the only name I had left that HYDRA hadn’t stolen from me.**

**“I’m sorry, my dearest,” I murmured softly. “Your Stevie isn’t here, but please…please…can you tell me what’s wrong?”**

**I held your hand, but you simply wouldn’t be comforted, “I…I need…I _need_ my Stevie,” you insisted.**

**You were right. I couldn’t soothe the pain of grief and loneliness in your soul; only the man that you loved with such enduring passion that you never forgot him could ever do that. I understood you, my dearest, because I shared your anguish.  I missed my Einar intensely, even though he wasn’t the same man I married towards the end. Guilt would gnaw at me and sometimes I’d hear his voice in my dreams, raised high above the screams of the prisoners I’d helped to torture, calling on me to join him in the grave, and I’d fight back my silly, weak, useless tears.**

**Einar Eriksson was dead.**

**But was Steve Rogers?**

**He most certainly should have been. To believe he was alive was surely nonsense, but your blind insistence tore at my heart.**

**It made me begin to question.**

**Still, alleviating your trauma was my first priority. Drawing on my last reserves of courage, I duped the cordon of guards that usually prevented prisoners from speaking to the Siberian base commander during one of his routine inspection tours. In the few seconds I had before I was dragged away again, I begged him to consider granting you an opportunity for recreational recovery, as opposed to the unremitting flat-line of cryostasis you’d always had to endure between missions.**

**I suffered a vicious beating from the guards for my trouble, but once the idea had been floated, it remained unexpectedly buoyant in the commander’s mind. Initially, his advisors raised concerns that a target-free mission might easily confuse you, as well as risking the reawakening of your memories. Although I knew it was dangerous to contradict them, I continued to stress that their fears were groundless and raised the stakes still further with a promise to accompany you to ensure your safety.**

**Your safety. That was a joke; none of them ever cared about you as a person, they just wanted a biddable asset. They didn’t understand you were flesh and blood and that what you needed most right then was the very thing they’d always sought to deny you: rest, relaxation and a precious taste of peace.**

**Eventually, the commander consented to my proposal for a recreational weekend and late in October he sent us, shadowed by a sullen squad of HYDRA guards, to that little Baltic seaside resort just north of Gdańsk** **. As we strolled towards the beach, we paused at that unashamedly rancid shack of a shop where you picked up your art book. And there, for the first time since 1943, you smiled; a true smile that lit up your whole damn face.**

**“I…I remember something.”**

**“Do you, dearest?”**

**“Did I used to draw?”**

**“I don’t know. You never said. What is it you’re looking at?” I readjusted my spectacles to peer at the Polish lettering on the cover: ‘The masterpieces of Michelangelo.’**

**And then suddenly there I was, back holding the Swedish translation of that same book under the glittering chandeliers of the Carolina Rediviva in 1923.**

**_“Are you studying Michelangelo?”_ **

**Damn you, Einar. And damn the random recollections of a stupid old man…**

 

**“Herr Doctor, why are you crying?”**

**“It’s nothing, nothing…I must have got a speck of dust in my eye from the old book.”**

**“That’s not true. You’re…you’re really crying.”**

**“I’m sorry. Just an old memory,” I waved your concern away. “My boyf…”**

**“My boyfriend used to be an artist,” you exclaimed, simultaneously interrupting and echoing my own words.**

**“Stevie?”**

**You brushed the dark chestnut bangs away from your face and looked at me; really looked at me.**

**“Was…was that his name?”**

**I nodded.**

Bucky was staring at the Dictaphone so hard that he didn’t notice Steve blink away the tears as the spear point pierced his heart, hearing the Winter Soldier painstakingly piece together the fragments of his memories of their love affair with Zola’s patient help.

 

**“What happened to him?”**

**I answered…very carefully. “He was lost to us. But maybe one day he’ll return. Who knows?”**

**“Was he…was he a good person?”**

**I smiled, looping my arm through your flesh arm and patting your hand reassuringly**

**“He was a very good person, my dearest; the best. One day I hope you’ll be together again. You two were so happy together.”**

Bucky glanced away from the Dictaphone, his eyes widening as he saw a sappy smile creep onto Steve’s face.

“Punk,” mouthed Bucky.

“Jerk,” Steve mouthed back.

 

**“Herr Doctor, am…am I a good person?”**

**Now came my turn to really look at _you_.**

**“Yes…yes you are. And don’t ever let anyone tell you any different.”**

And now Steve elbowed Bucky in his side, as Bucky blushed furiously at Zola’s praise.

 

**Honestly, I don’t think that was a lie, not even a little white one. You’d endured more episodes of merciless degradation from HYDRA than I could count, yet you retained more of your humanity than I ever did. And the strength of your memory, even after all those years of mind wipes, surely meant that Steve Rogers must have been the one true love of your life. I might not have been able to reunite you both, but I certainly wasn’t going to pour cold water on the precious embers of your memories.**

**The glint in your smile warmed my heart. It was as if heaven’s gates had opened to permit me a brief glimpse of paradise.**

**“You’re a good person too, Herr Doctor!”**

**And bless you Bucky, but that was just like you. You could peer into the ugliest soul and still see the unstirred wings of an angel.**

**But angels have wings, and this was but a flight of fancy.**

**I bought the book for you. I knew HYDRA’s policy - that the asset was a possession, and therefore couldn’t own possessions itself – but the same rule didn’t apply to me. HYDRA had granted me a little pocket money for ‘expenses’ and I could just as easily say I had bought it for myself. I could keep it for you, and I could let you hold it as we strolled together through the thin damp mist along the creaking wooden pier jutting out into the Baltic Sea.**

**“Coney Island,” you murmured.**

**“Hmm? Where’s that?”**

**“I…I don’t know. I…was happy there…I think.”**

**“With Stevie?”**

**“Yes…yes I think so.”**

**“What did you do?”**

**“I dunno,” you shrugged. “Had fun, I guess. It’s all a little hazy. Mostly I remember his touch. He had real soft hair and such smooth pale skin.”**

**You turned your head to look towards your arm socket and shuddered…**

Zola’s voice dropped out for a few moments, as the warped tape’s integrity once again caused the recording’s volume to waver. The next thing Steve heard clearly was:

 

**“…people can look past those scars, dearest. It’s only the scars in your mind stopping your happy thoughts.”**

**It was true, wasn’t it? Einar had looked past my ugliness. He must have loved me at some point, surely? If your Steve were alive I’m sure he’d have loved you too, no matter what.**

**We shared a little overpainted table, bleeding through with rust, outside the café at the end of the pier, looking out on the vast expanse of dark blue extending past the opaque barrier of the encroaching fog bank. Far beyond it, a city where I’d sat and sipped coffee with another young man, a lifetime ago, beckoned to me. You nursed a steaming bowl of beetroot soup, just to enjoy the warmth and the aroma. By that stage, HYDRA had switched away from oral nourishment to direct intubation; as yet another precious scrap of your humanity was snatched away from you.**

“Give…give me a moment,” gasped Bucky.

Steve jabbed at the pause button, concern written all over his face. “What’s wrong, Buck?”

Bucky shivered. “It’s…it’s just…I’m getting the strongest flashback. You see, I remember! I remember the earthy scent of the soup, the mist at the edge of the pier, the icy wind from the sea biting the tips of my ear lobes...”

“And Zola?”

Bucky smiled wistfully, “A little old man wrapped up in a scarf, his hat pulled down round his ears, and a lopsided grin on his face. It felt like we’d both run away from school for the day. And I held a book in my hands that reminded me of the man who ‘Herr Doctor’ said would come back for me some day.”

Steve’s eyes brimmed with tears. “You remembered me? You…really…remembered me?”

“Just images, but all of them were such bright sunny ones. Most of my time was in darkness, Stevie. I barely remember any of this, but…but for that one day, Zola fanned the flame of my memories…he rekindled a fire in my heart, but…I was so scared…so uncertain.”

Bucky closed his eyes and nodded for Steve to resume the tape.

By some incredible co-incidence, the old man must have anticipated his feelings just then, because the next thing he uttered was…

 

**Given everything you’d been through, I shouldn’t have been surprised when you asked,**

**“Herr Doctor, what am I?”**

 

Bucky forced down a nervous gulp, leaning forward on the edge of the sofa. He closed his eyes, holding his breath for Zola’s response.

It was probably only a few seconds, but even to Steve, it felt like an eternity.

A high pitched squeal from the Dictaphone was the first indication that something was seriously wrong, followed by an ominous clicking sound, as if the machine were straining against some insurmountable impediment, preventing the spools of the cassette tape from travelling forward.

Steve snatched up the mechanism in a panic, jabbing his finger insistently on the chunky ‘stop’ button. Yet still the piteous squeal continued.

In desperation, he yanked open the compartment housing the cassette. A spaghetti-like jumble of tape innards ejected violently at his face.

Bucky gasped in horror.

Steve managed to pry the tape out of the machine more or less instantly. But the damage had already been done. They could both see the knotted mass of celluloid ended abruptly where the tape had snapped.

“No!” Bucky’s despondent cry sounded grief-stricken.

Steve gingerly collected the remains of the tape together in the palm of his hand. He remembered what Taj had said about being careful with stopping and starting the Dictaphone if the sound was fading and a tidal wave of guilt engulfed him.

“Bucky…oh God, I’m…I’m so sorry. I got careless with the tape. This…this is all my fault.”

Bucky didn’t respond with words at first. He almost seemed to cower, his body protectively curling in on itself. Finally, in the haunted tone of a lost child, he murmured, “That’s it, isn’t it? We’ll never know what happened in the end.”

Steve joined Bucky on his couch, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder “Sweetheart, please don’t say that. There’s always…”

Steve stilled his tongue. Such platitudes only insulted his boyfriend’s intelligence. Bucky knew, and he knew, that they’d come to the end of the line.

“It’s funny,” Bucky said, his voice becalmed by the onset of shock. “When we started all this, I hoped to never hear Zola’s voice again, but now that he’s stopped forever…”

Steve enfolded Bucky into a tight embrace as his boyfriend began to weep sharp, bitter tears. He’d have given anything to make Bucky’s pain go away, but short of doing a deal with the devil, he couldn’t think of any way to fix this.

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve and Bucky try to fix their problem, in very different ways…

 

Steve’s sense of guilt over the broken tape was understandable, but ruminating over that guilt wasn’t doing him any favors. It dizzied the equilibrium of his mind, demanding resolution.  He desperately needed to fix this somehow, but he hadn’t formulated a course of action beyond escaping the suffocating claustrophobia of their apartment by returning to the scene of the crime.

He’d hoped to fall into some kind of casual conversation with the police officers, perhaps even sweet-talk them into letting him take another look around.

But when he saw the red double-doors of the sub-basement unguarded he froze in panic.

Maybe Bucky had been right all along. Maybe HYDRA hadn’t finished with them yet.

The sub-basement was shrouded in darkness. Steve hadn’t been afraid of the dark in his entire life, even when he was half the size he was now, but the shadows in that place held a special menace to him, and the love of his life.

Tentatively, he inched open the door.

The shaft of light must have betrayed him, because a moment later footsteps from the gloom echoed towards him.

Steve’s heart flew into his throat. He considered slamming the door shut and fleeing back up the stairwell but…he was Captain America, damnit! And superheroes are sometimes obliged to do superhuman things. That included running towards the cause of alarm instead of away from it.

Swallowing down his fears, he called out to the black shape striding towards him.

“Who is it?”

“Shhhh…keep it down will ya? You want the whole of the NYPD to hear?”

The light from the stairwell was just enough to confirm Steve’s hunch.

“Colonel Fury?”

“Well, who’dya think?” came the grumbled response.

“What on earth are you doing sneaking around down here on your own in the…”

Fury’s flashlight shone back at him. “God damnit, will you lower your voice, Rogers?”

“I…I don’t think I understand, sir,” Steve replied, in a stage whisper.

Fury shook his head “Ever the overgrown Boy Scout. I’m ‘sneaking around’ because I really shouldn’t be here. And before you start getting all high-minded about it, I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t be here either.”

Steve was glad that it was too dark for Fury to see his furious blush.

“So, where are the cops?”

“Distracted ‘em with a free meal. SHIELD posted enough guards of its own to keep ‘em satisfied.”

“And you dismissed the SHIELD guards.”

“You catch on quick, Rogers. I thought the cops might keep a couple of their own men down here to stay with our people, and I had a complicated plan all worked out for that, but in the event the cops didn’t even doubt our sincerity. Guess the boredom of guarding this place for days really got to ‘em, in the end, huh?”

“But not to you, Colonel?”

“No…not to me. Y’see, in the absence of being able to investigate the possible murder, Stark decided to do some passive scans of the office down here. And he might just have turned up something very interesting; very interesting indeed.”

“Like, what?”

“I’ll tell you if I can confirm it, but to do that I need to get into that office again. So, you gonna help me, Rogers, or run off and squeal to the cops?”

Steve framed his best ‘righteous indignation’ look. “I wouldn’t dream of betraying a friend,” he sniffed.

Slowly the two of them made their way back to the gap in the false wall. Steve realised this would mean him heading back into the Zola’s office once more, and with only Fury’s pretty weak flashlight to light the way, but he came here for clues, just as Fury had. And the recollection of Bucky’s anguished face when the tape snapped pushed him on, past his fears.

The gap Reyanish had made with that lump hammer was even wider than Steve had remembered it. It made their negotiation into the room much easier than their first visit, which was just as well given they were pretty much staggering around in the dark this time.

As if reading his mind, Fury handed the flashlight over to Steve. “Hold this for me.”

“Where do you want me to point it, sir?”

“Over by the desk.”

Fury had foresight enough not to squarely plant his boot in the desk’s rotting surface, as Steve had done. He carefully picked his way over an obstacle course of collapsed office furniture to the cabling above the panic button.

“Hmm, just as I thought, reinforced steel,” he observed, tapping the housing with his knuckles. “Once this button had been triggered, no-one would have been able to deactivate it. However, they did leave this small access port just here.” He pointed to a tiny socket concealed just below the smashed glass panel.

“Access for what, sir?”

“Probably some kind of crude data reader. It would have registered the time the alarm was triggered; maybe how long it had been activated for,” he shrugged. “But…it might also detect traces of anything in the primitive computer systems that shouldn’t have been there.”

“I don’t think I follow you.”

“You wouldn’t. And that’s not any kind of poor reflection on your intelligence, Rogers. I didn’t understand myself until Stark pointed out how Zola’s office might hold the key to another mystery.”

Fury scrabbled around for a moment in his inside pocket, before producing a four inch long chromium and bronze tapered probe, a covert object fashioned into a bejeweled icon by a certain inventor of their mutual acquaintance who’d always had a weakness for beauty.  Fury slid his thumb over the ruby encrusted base, illuminating a needle-sharp probe at its tip, which he promptly slid into the access port. Tony’s little gizmo began emitting a faint rhythmic beep.

He glanced back at Steve. “This might take some time,” he warned.

“You mind if I take a look around?” Steve asked.

“Sure, be my guest. If I’m doing stuff I shouldn’t be doing, you might as well join in the fun.”

Steve cast around the office in long sweeping strokes with Fury’s flashlight, trying to take in as much of the room as he possibly could. The desk he’d already seen of course; that dull remnant of capsized office furniture he’d scrambled beneath to retrieve the Dictaphone tape, now sadly lost to him forever. This time he also noticed the desk once had a drawer, the front of which had long since fallen away, revealing nothing but an empty space.

In search of more clues, Steve scanned the plain walls with increasing frustration until he came upon the tall, narrow bookcase he’d barely given a moment’s thought to on his first visit, huddled apologetically in a corner. The two lower shelves had collapsed in on themselves; an amorphous pile of illegible mush was all that remained of their contents.  However, perched up on the top shelf, a single dust-caked book had miraculously survived. Gently edging it off the shelf, Steve heard the sound of something small and heavy, concealed by that book for decades; capsize with a dull thud onto the wooden surface. With great care, he reached up and grasped the filthy metallic object. He’d almost succeeded in sneaking both it and the book into the pocket of his tan leather jacket when Fury piped up:

“You noticed the door yet?”

Steve nearly dropped the little object, managing to catch it mid-air just in time.

Either Fury didn’t seem to notice his impromptu juggling act, or chose to ignore it.

“What?” Steve asked, in a high pitch.

“The door, Rogers. Did you notice it before?”

Steve shone the flashlight a little way past the bookcase and over to the doorframe.

Come to think of it, he had noticed the door before. He remembered it was a heavy metal door, hanging to the doorframe by only a single hinge. But now he had the chance to examine the door more closely he could see the reason why.

“Gee,” he gasped “Someone really went to town on this, didn’t they?”

“Yeah,” Fury agreed. “That would have been a top-of-the-range high security door for its day; six inches of hardened steel, and yet something, or rather…someone…managed to pretty much snap it in two.”

“Who would have been strong enough to break down a door this strong?” Steve queried.

“Probably the same individual they had in mind when they installed this reinforced panic alarm. HYDRA fitted some pretty serious deterrents into this room. They must have been damn well scared of someone, Rogers.”

Steve blanched.

He couldn’t believe it had taken this long for the penny to drop.

“Bucky,” he breathed. His mind flew to the Colt pistol, the execution-style shot to the back of the head. Had Bucky’s hunch about Zola’s death been right all along? Had the Winter Soldier smashed his way in to murder the man who’d tried to protect him?

His thoughts were interrupted by the little probe’s rhythmic beeping raising in pitch and volume until it was positively screaming at them.

“Shhhhh!” Fury hissed at the object, all but ripping it out of the socket. “Shine the flashlight over here again, Rogers.”

Steve did as he was asked. Fury scanned the read-out on the side of the probe and gave an appreciative whistle. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he exclaimed.

“What’s it found, Colonel?”

“A virus,” Fury explained. “A primitive algorithmic computer virus, calculated to count down for literally decades, before activating the pixels necessary to display a series of co-ordinates onto a single computer-user’s terminal, namely my own.”

“That’s…complicated,” Steve admitted, not sure what else to make of the news.

“It’s the work of a god damn genius, that’s what it is.” Fury concluded. “I’ll need to square this with Stark of course, but if his hunch is correct, then we may just have discovered the key to one of the SHIELD’s greatest mysteries.”

Steve knew Fury was being cryptic, but he couldn’t force himself to care. All that really mattered was Bucky…and the contents of his jacket pocket.

 

-*-

 

“So, let me get this straight. This tape contains nothing that explains the reason behind the sudden appearance of a body in the sub-basement?”

“Nothing,” agreed Bucky, with a shrug. “Or at least nothing so far. That doesn’t mean there might not be something later on in the recording I guess.”

“Given the proportion of tape on either side of the cartridge, I’d say you were already more than three quarters way through the running time when it broke.”

Bucky sighed heavily and slumped into the chair he’d been offered minutes before, but had initially declined.

“All right,” Tony laid the damaged cassette back on his desk and sat further forward, forming his fingers into a steeple at his chin. “You mind telling me why this is so important to you?”

“Zola… well, he…” Bucky brushed his hand through his hair distractedly. “He wasn’t the monster I thought he was. He’d been so badly hurt, but he tried to keep me safe as best he could. I barely remember a thing from my time in captivity, and what I do remember ain’t pretty. But it seems I wasn’t alone. Zola was with me…” Bucky paused for a shaky breath.  “…and I…”

Tony abandoned his steeple to hold out a placatory palm.

“All right, all right, you sold me, Barnes. I…I get it,” he reassured Bucky, his voice softening a little. “I suppose I got it when you came here to see me of your own accord. Steve doesn’t even know you’re here, does he?”

Bucky shook his head. “We got someone else to try and fix the cassette independently but when they said the tape couldn’t be fixed if it broke…”

“They said what?” Tony scoffed, incredulously. “You shouldn’t be listening to a bunch of amateurs, Barnes. You leave this with your Uncle Tony.”

Bucky’s smile was forced, a twitch worrying the corner.

“You think I’m going to listen to it, don’t you? That’s why you didn’t come to me sooner, huh?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky admitted. “I didn’t want to take that chance, though.”

Tony smiled “You’re a smart cookie, Bucky Barnes; a smart-ass too, but let’s not split hairs. Tell you what, how about you stick around to watch me fix it? It’s not often I have an audience around to witness my brilliance, excepting JARVIS of course, but he doesn’t count.”

“Oh, I don’t, do I?” Drawled the butler-like voice.

“No, you don’t. I made you. You’re unconscionably biased.”

JARVIS didn’t respond directly, but Bucky got the feeling a virtual bird was being virtually flipped somewhere in the servo-relays of Stark’s state-of-the-art databanks.

“And you’d do all this? For me?”

“Sure,” shrugged Tony. “What are friends for? I mean, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know if Zola finally fingers the murderer, assuming there is one. That’d be a great help in getting the cops off SHIELD’s back, but that’s the only thing I ask of you. And if you need anything else from Stark Industries on this, no matter what it is, then I’ll do my level best to help. Just ask JARVIS.”

“Just ask JARVIS, just ask JARVIS,” parroted the computerized voice in a sing-song fashion. “You see how he talks to me, Sergeant Barnes?”

Bucky smiled to himself as he followed Tony into the lab, wondering exactly how Steve might talk to _him_ once he’d retold the story of what he had done to retrieve their recording.

 

-*-

 

Steve shook his head in disbelief when Bucky returned to the apartment flush with success and fresh with the details of his conversation with Tony.

"Of all the things I thought you'd do while my back was turned..."

Bucky interrupted with an affectionate snort. "You'll find I'm full of surprises, Rogers."

Steve bit his lip at the irony of that remark, as he slid the hastily cleaned objects he’d found on the bookcase in the sub-basement off the surface of their kitchen worktop and back into his pocket.

"Yeah, you’ve done a lot of surprising from what I’ve heard off that tape already, Buck.” Steve rejoined Bucky, slouching back on the opposite couch. “So, it's really repaired?"

"In a manner of speaking," Bucky said. "Taj was right. A broken tape can't be repaired, but it can be re-recorded, assuming you throw enough money and technology at it."

"Well, Stark's got plenty of both. And he didn't listen to any of it?"

"He was too busy babbling on about new-fangled doohickeys I couldn’t even pretend to understand, all while JARVIS went ahead and actually did the work."

"Yeah, that sounds a lot like Stark," Steve sniffed.

"Of course, I can't guarantee he's not listened to the re-recorded version he’s stored with JARVIS, I only have his word on that, but..." Bucky flashed a shy smile. "...I actually believe him when he says he respects our need for privacy."

"I don’t understand. He always wants to stick his nose into stuff.”

"I know, but after I really explained what the tape meant to me; to both of us. I’m pretty sure he understood."

Steve grinned. He was so proud of Bucky he was fit to burst.

"Of course, if we hear anything that might help the investigation, he'd like to know, but we'd do that anyhow, right?"

"Sure,” Steve shrugged.

"And in return, he's said if there's anything Stark Industries can do to help us with this, then all we need to do is ask."

"Wow. He said that, huh?"

Bucky snorted at the surprise on Steve’s face.

Tony’s natural inclination was to be more curious than a cat sporting a velveteen thinking cap, and Steve was glad they’d gone to Taj first, because hearing Zola’s words helped him understand how important the tape was to them. But Bucky always knew how to get the best out of everybody, and that included him, and Tony, and even Zola it seemed.

"I…I still can't believe you persuaded him," Steve said, still numbed by joy.

 "Well then, there's only one way to prove it to you," Bucky smiled. "JARVIS?"

"Right here, Sergeant Barnes, there's no need to shout," The voice responded.

"Please replay the tape from...‘Given everything you’d been through…’

“As you wish, Sergeant Barnes”

Bucky hesitated for a moment, and then joined Steve on the couch, glancing at him nervously.  Steve cradled Bucky’s hand, stroking his thumb over the palm, as Zola’s voice resumed:

 

**Given everything you’d been through, I shouldn’t have been surprised when you asked,**

**“Herr Doctor, what am I?”**

**I took a sip of my coffee to think it through. Despite being their prisoner, in the early days HYDRA insisted on lauding you as my greatest creation. Like I was Baron von Frankenstein or something. All I’d done was ruin a perfectly good Michelangelo with the daubs of my finger painting.**

**“You’re you, my dearest. You’re unique. Only you can know your true value.”**

**“That…doesn’t help me very much.” You stared despondently into the cooling soup bowl.**

**“Then you’re Steve’s boyfriend.”**

**“What does that even _mean_?”**

**“It means that you’re loved, you’re cherished, and one day he’ll help you to rediscover who you are.”**

**“But can’t you do that?”**

**The desperation in your question tore at me.**

**I slipped off the Fedora to rake my fingers through the thin greying traces of my youth.**

**“I…don’t know you like he does. And I don’t…I…can’t…I can’t love you in the same sort of way.”**

**My heart ached to say it, but it was perfectly true. I, Zola, the monster who’d twisted you into a deadly weapon, couldn’t ever love you the way you needed to be loved.  At best, I could try to fulfil the role my own dear father had played for me, but the lukewarm tenderness of my broken heart was no substitute for the burning passion of the love of your life. You deserved better. You deserved to be with Steve. You deserved to be with each other.**

**“But where _is_ he?” This time the tone of your voice didn’t even inflect towards a question. It was a bitter lament.**

**I placed the coffee cup back in its saucer and settled my little hand on your own.**

**“He’s alive, my dearest. And if you’re strong for me, if you can stay alive too, then I, Zola, swear to you that you’ll be together again one day. You have my word on it.”**

_-*-_

**It was a tremendously foolhardy promise to make.**

**I knew you couldn’t hold me to it; that you’d be made to forget much of our day together at the very next mind wipe.**

**But I held myself to it. That precious look on your face when you thought there was hope; it was enough to keep my own hope alive.**

**I doubted I could ever re-unite you with your one true love, but the least I could do was to confirm if he really was dead.**

**And there was only one way to do that.**

**Several years later, I selflessly volunteered to lend my scientific expertise to an expedition investigating new locations for HYDRA bases in the furthest reaches of the Arctic Circle. My captors found it expedient to accept my offer, given that you were between missions, my dearest, and the few junior agents they’d press-ganged for the operation didn’t exactly exhibit the highest levels of intellectual capability.  Everyone thought I was mad to embark upon such a dangerous trip at my age, but I really didn’t care. After all, I finally found what I’d gone looking for, so their opinions didn’t matter.**

**And anyway, they applauded what they believed to be my single-minded determination and dedication to the cause, even more so when I returned exhausted, frostbitten and alone, the rest of the team having perished in a series of random tragic accidents along the way. The captain of our hired icebreaker spoke most movingly of my selfless actions in attempting to save them, all whilst rubbing the last of my gold wedding rings between his fingers in the dark secrecy of his coat pocket.**

 

 


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zola faces his nemesis.  Can the old man protect Bucky against this terrifying new threat?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting my own artwork for Zola today, since the final piece of the puzzle fits into place.  
>  The images (going clockwise) represent my impression of:  
> 
> 
> Einar and Zola in their younger days  
>  Zola's medical syringes  
>  The pier Bucky and Zola walked down in Sopot  
>  Zola's spectacles and papers...and the mystery behind that final image will be revealed in this episode.
> 
> So, was 'I, Zola' the untold story of a monster? Read on to discover...

**_ **New York City, United States of America 1973** _ **

 

**“You’re late.”**

**I knew an apology wouldn’t cut any ice with our new leader, so I opted for that brutal strain of truth favored by his predecessor.**

**“Your agents had been replaced at customs. The new ones started inspecting everything.”**

**Our leader glared a look of intense displeasure at a figure behind me. The sound of his pitiful screaming as he was dragged away to God-alone knew what fate, reverberated around the sub-basement.**

**“I like things to go smooth,” he observed, looking at me directly but clearly addressing the whole group of ex-Soviet HYDRA agents gathered about me. “If I don’t get what I want, then I’ll not hesitate to force the point to get your attention. And if that doesn’t work, then there won’t be any second chances.”**

**The stench of childish self-importance poisoned every breath Alexander Pierce exhaled. I recognized it from Einar’s Nazi rants of course, but, for a leader, it’s a fatal flaw. Schmidt never felt the need to puff himself up like that. His command was supreme. Pierce, on the other hand, shook his little fists at the air. He was insecure and that meant I was insecure. More importantly, that meant you were insecure, my dearest.**

**From now on, we’d have to watch our step.**

-*-

**A few weeks later, the stench returned to the sub-basement.**

**Pierce had the temerity to look about my office and sniff, “This place is a mess.”**

**As if I’d ever venture into his fetid lair and grumble about the housekeeping.**

**“There was a time I could fit my life in a Gladstone bag,” I said, glancing at the yellowing piles of manuals and papers stacked up in every corner. “But the HYDRA units in Siberia were ruled by ranks of meticulous bureaucrats. Those Soviets insisted on a paper trail for everything.”**

**“Well, now you’re in America,” he retorted stiffly. “And in this country it’s a fire hazard.”**

**“I never knew you cared.”**

**“I don’t. But if your office goes up in flames, SHIELD will discover this facility, and I’ll hold you personally responsible.”**

**My mind flashed back to the Gladstone bag and how I’d used its false bottom to sneak out those analgesics for you from Pankiewicz’s pharmacy all those years ago. The number of times I’d used that trusty bag since to decamp from HYDRA base to HYDRA base. How I wished I could have packed it to go back home to my father in Switzerland and never used it again.**

**But that dream had died long ago. In its place I stood staring impassively at the face of yet another HYDRA leader, and this one little more than an unstable child.**

**I couldn’t keep my irritation to myself for a moment longer.**

**“And how exactly am I meant to clear all this paperwork out for you, Herr Pierce? I can’t exactly stagger out to the dumpster with an armful of trash bags, now can I?”**

**Pierce grimaced hard. “Don’t test me, Zola,” he snarled. “The Siberian high-command might have sentimentalized you into a sweet little old man, but we both know you’re nothing more than a HYDRA slave.”**

**“I prefer the term, scientist,” I answered, as coolly as I could, pushing my slipping spectacles back up against my nose, just as I’d done in Pankiewicz’s consulting room some 30 years before.**

**With hindsight, talking back to Pierce probably wasn’t the wisest of decisions. But I hadn’t been prepared for just how brutally he slapped me across my face.**

 

Bucky’s flinch sent a cold shiver down Steve’s spine. He understood the cause of it. Months before, Bucky had recounted the story of Pierce’s violent slap when the ‘asset’ had remembered Steve on the bridge.

Zola had just confirmed in Steve’s mind, if there had ever been any doubt, that Pierce was the kind of bully worthy of a special place in hell.

**“You don’t get the luxury of preferences,” Pierce snarled. “You get to obey me, which means cleaning up this pigsty of an office. Oh, and if you think the term ‘scientist’ has a higher distinction than ‘slave’ for me, then I’d suggest you think again. Not so long ago, I had a scientist buried alive for answering me back once too often.”**

**How could this pompous buffoon understand that his petty threats were threadbare to me? The paperwork he’d just been sneering at included an extensive collection of medical records. My terminal cancer diagnosis was no secret, but not widely known. Pierce seemed oblivious enough, so I’d no intention of drawing his attention to it. If he thought I was weak, then I’d be as good as dead anyway, and I had to stay alive; someone had to be there for you, my dearest.**

**He obviously misread my prolonged thoughtfulness as abject terror, because he seemed to relax a little.**

**“You don’t need to go to the dumpster, Zola. We have people for that.” He snapped his fingers at a random HYDRA agent walking past the office.**

**“You!” he yelled out to the nameless underling. “Take any paperwork the doctor wants disposing of to our incineration facility in precisely 2 hours.”**

**He glanced back to me. “I’m guessing even a decrepit old man like you can sort through this pigsty in 2 hours,” he concluded, in a tone that didn’t invite disagreement.**

**I nodded dutifully.**

**“Good,” he said, settling into my chair and stretching his legs out the desk. “Because I have a new assignment for you.”**

**I genuinely smiled at this news. It seemed to confirm Pierce’s ignorance of my medical condition.**

**“I want a full breakdown of the supersoldier serum by the end of the month.”**

**Starting my next sentence with a ‘But’ wasn’t advisable. I’d no intention of enduring more of his petty tantrums or suffering yet another slap.**

**“Herr Pierce, are we recommencing the ‘Fist of HYDRA’ program?” I ventured.**

**“That all depends on how feasible it is. But it’s clear the asset isn’t as effective as it once was. I’ve heard reports of it continuing to remember things, even after the mind wipes.”**

**It seemed my threats, which had always proved effective in keeping the technicians in line, were dwindling as rapidly as my health. Someone had been telling tales out of class.**

**“You don’t need me to tell you that retained memories could lead to a serious malfunction,” Pierce continued. “If we can replicate the original experiment, then we should be able to ‘retire’ the Winter Soldier permanently. I presume you have the appropriate chemicals for euthanasia?”**

**I nodded, my face frozen into an impenetrable mask, betraying no reaction to his murderous intentions, as the angry scar of Einar’s death split open in my memory.**

**“That’s why we‘ll need your serum formulae of course. Do you have your existing notes to draw on?” he waved a hand airily at my soon-to-be doomed paperwork.**

**“No sir, I never committed that information to paper in case the Americans ever gained access to our facilities.”**

**He nodded his understanding. “And I suppose that goes for computer files too?” He tilted his head in the direction of the ominous looking battleship-grey terminal perched on a trolley over by the bookcase.**

**“Oh, that thing?” I snorted in derision. “It’s not mine. It just sits in here when the technicians don’t need it, to give more room to the asset during testing. I’m far too old to start learning how to work computers now.”**

**Pierce shot me a wide grin.**

**I didn’t think much of his teeth.**

**“Which reminds me,” he said. “I’m aware you’re growing infirm, so the mind transfer experiment we abandoned last year will be repeated as soon as I have your formulae.  Since you’re clearly no good with computers, I’ll assign someone else to head up the team this time. That way we won’t screw up again.”**

**Clearly, this was the day for bad news.**

**“And in the meantime,” he continued. “I’m going to have some security measures put in here for your own protection. You’re working in a cramped space, and if the asset malfunctions again we can’t afford to lose your mind before the transfer.”**

**I bit my tongue just in time. You see, I still kept your old infantry pistol in my top drawer as a crude deterrent, although in truth I’d have never used it against you, even if you’d chosen to tear me limb from limb. But it would have been a mistake to tell this petulant child I had a toy he couldn’t play with.**

**After he’d stomped off in search of someone new to torment, I settled deep into thought.**

**All in all, it hadn’t been the worst of all possible outcomes. His little jibe about infirmity seemed related to advanced age rather than advanced cancer. He’d swallowed my lie about computer literacy easily enough and, most importantly, he didn’t appear to suspect me of sabotaging the previous mind transfer project.**

**But without effective control of that project anymore, my fate was sealed.**

**I was no fool. I knew I was going to die, and sooner rather than later. I also knew what HYDRA did with its dead. I’d most likely be following my paperwork to the incinerator. For me there would be no reunion with my beloved father in a Swiss cemetery, or any prospect of an afterlife beyond the nightmare of being trapped in a computer forever. That was my sole fear of being ‘buried alive’.**

**Initially, I’d debated whether the mind transfer might at least give me more time to stay with you and keep you safe, my dearest. But once I was a machine, Pierce could toy with my mind the same way that HYDRA had played with your own. My knowledge of you and your Stevie could all too easily be torn from my memory, and used as a weapon against you.**

**And…well….although I couldn’t tell you of my plans, I knew you reasoned like me, dearest. I knew that you’d have understood this. You’d have understood that the time had finally come for me to die.**

 

 

“No!” Bucky exclaimed. “You can’t do that!”

Steve blinked back his surprise. “JARVIS, pause playback.”

“Damn it! You..you can’t…you can’t _do_ that!”

“I can’t pause the recording, Buck?”

“No…not _you_ ,” Bucky snapped back. “ _Him_.”

Bucky glowered up into the air, where Zola’s voice had floated up until a moment ago.

“He’s trying to make me agree with him. He can’t do that,” Bucky clarified, more quietly now. “Just because I think like him sometimes, doesn’t mean I want to see him dead.”

Steve nodded, finally appreciating why his boyfriend was so upset.

“Bucky,” Steve said, carefully. “Zola was dying already; riddled with cancer. If he’d stayed alive, he’d have been trapped in that computer, ‘buried alive’ as he put it.”

“I’m not saying he’s wrong,” Bucky answered between gritted teeth, his gaze sinking to the coffee table. “I’m saying it’s more complicated than that. Just because Zola had to die, doesn’t mean that I wanted him to die.”

Steve placed his arm gently around Bucky’s shoulders. “That’s…that’s not what he said, Buck.”

“No, but it’s how he’s making me feel about it. It feels like he’s trying to shake me free, like a father making peace with his son on the death bed. And…” Bucky looked back up at Steve, unshed tears glittering in his eyes. “ …and I don’t want to be free of him. I don’t want him…I…I don’t want him to go.”

“Oh God, sweetheart,” Steve gasped.

Bucky buried himself in Steve’s tight embrace, his body shuddering with raw emotion.

They held each other for several minutes, offering each other wordless comfort through the familiarity of gentle, caring caresses.

At length, Bucky slid back against the corner of the couch, exhausted by grief.

Steve had taken care of Bucky’s emotional needs as best he could. Now he seized the chance to take care of the physical ones. A few minutes later, and Bucky was wolfing down one of the pastrami on rye sandwiches Steve had prepared for them.

“Better?” Steve smiled.

“Better,” agreed Bucky, with a lick of the lips. ”I’d no idea how hungry I was. Thanks for taking care of me, Stevie.”

“It’s no more than you deserve, Buck.”

“And I’m…I’m sorry…”

“Don’t be, you’ve every right to be upset about Zola’s….”

“No, no, it’s not that…well not _just_ that, anyways.” Bucky said.

“Then what?” Steve asked, gently resting his hand on Bucky’s shoulder.

“It’s…well…I know you’ll think this is silly…”

Steve raised his eyebrows in that dramatic way of his that needed no translation. He didn’t think anything Bucky said was silly.

Bucky snickered at that. “It’s just that you called me ‘sweetheart’ again, when I was upset. And I…well… y’know, like we said before, I never felt comfortable giving you a pet name.”

“Oh Buck,” Steve sighed. “I don’t need a pet name to know that you love me. You said before, it’s not your style, and I respect that.”

“It didn’t stop Zola using ‘em to me either.”

“You’re not Zola, and Zola’s not you,” Steve explained. “Zola said ‘dearest’ because he came from a generation like ours where two men couldn’t use it for each other. He got a thrill out of using it, but it meant different things to him depending on who he said it to. When he said it to Einar, he meant it like a lover; when he said it to you, he meant it like a father.”

“But I never said it back to him, any more than I say ‘sweetheart’ back to you, even though you both deserve it, in different ways.”

Steve shook his head. “When you call me, ‘Stevie’, I know you love me. When you called him, ‘Herr Doctor’, he knew you were comfortable being near him. That’s all either of us could ever want or need. So, never beat yourself up about this pet name stuff again, do you hear me, Barnes?”

Bucky nodded soberly.

“Because I love you just the way you are, Buck, ‘sweetheart’ or no ‘sweetheart’, ‘kay?”

“Okay, _Stevie_ ,” Bucky said, pointedly, a sly smile forming on his lips. He sighed, his smile turning more wistful. “I guess we’d better continue with the recording, now.”

“You don’t have to. We can wait.”

“I know we can,” Bucky said, leaning his head against Steve’s shoulder. “But if the doctor needs me to let go, then…” he sighed heavily. “…then I guess I’m ready now.”

Steve nodded. “JARVIS, resume playback.”

 

**I didn’t particularly fear death, my dearest. If anything, the prospect concentrated my mind wonderfully through the imposition of a time limit; a ‘dead line’ if you will.**

**As that management textbook said, ‘People work better to deadlines’.**

**And so, in the greatest secrecy, your little scientist synthesized his own masterplan.**

**That plan would be complicated and it would have some holes I lacked the time to plug. But it would culminate in one final throw of the dice.**

**Pierce was a toddler running round with unlimited power. He had no regard for anything or anyone, even in his own organization.  I could find ways to thwart his immediate danger to you, but one day Pierce would grow up, and on that day I knew he would kill millions…**

**…unless I killed him first.**

_-*-_

**“Are you all right sir?”**

**“Yes, I’m…I’m quite all right. Just a little dizzy”**

**“You do know there are several banks of elevators in this building,” The young soldier advised, handing me back my battered Fedora. “A gentleman of your age really shouldn’t be taking the stairs.”**

**I ignored that rather insulting implication and thanked Second Lieutenant Fury politely for his advice and his kindness…**

**…all whilst memorizing the details on his ID badge.**

**Once back in my office right under SHIELD’s arrogant noses, it was simplicity itself to sneak onto that terminal in the dead of night and access their database to bring up his details, given our enemy had already been thoroughly infiltrated by then.  Schmidt had been scrupulous, even though he lacked the most basic of scruples, but Pierce’s brand of sadism was subjective and sloppy. I was certain he’d remain oblivious to the algorithmic virus cloaking a series of geographical co-ordinates that I’d planted deep within SHIELD’s mainframe, ready to automatically de-encrypt on Fury’s computer terminal in precisely 38 years’ time.**

**Why so long?**

**The technology isn’t suitable to salvage the wreckage of the Valkyrie right now. And medicine hasn’t advanced to the stage where they could defrost your boyfriend safely.**

**Of course, I’m taking a series of risks with all of this; careful calculated risks, but risks nonetheless. I don’t think Fury will ever leave SHIELD. The management textbook predicts he’ll remain loyal and receive multiple promotions in the years to come, but there’s always the potential that he’ll fall in the line of duty.**

**It was the best I could do.**

The corner of Steve’s lip curled upwards into a wry smile. He’d been told; the world had been told, that Russian oil workers discovered his body, and that the Valkyrie had gradually risen from its frozen grave though the incremental shifts of ice floes in the years following the crash.

Now he came to think of it, of course that story had been baloney. Yet another flash of colorful theatre, just like the fake 1940s hospital where he’d been revived. It was just that the circumstances behind his discovery had never really interested him before, so he hadn’t bothered looking too closely. And of course, SHIELD weren’t actually lying to him about his discovery because they hadn't known the truth either; they’d just invented a convenient little story to plug their mystery.

So finally Steve understood why Colonel Fury looked so excited when he’d discovered the computer virus. The mystery of the phantom co-ordinates had finally been solved, in the shape of a little old man in a Fedora hat who gave away his gold wedding rings far too freely.

 

**Transcribing the details of the supersoldier serum wasn’t particularly taxing given that I’d lied to Pierce. Einar often called me naïve, and maybe back then I was, but did our glorious leader really think I’d be able to recall page after page of complex chemical formulae without access to a source document?**

**Over the years, and despite our countless base relocations, HYDRA had always let me keep hold of my old wedding photograph, that last trace of my life with Einar. They sneered at my sentimentality when they caught me gazing fondly at it, or breathing in the scent of that final sprig of my Edelweiss posy which I still kept pressed between the photograph and its frame, but they never questioned, or even bothered to examine it. If they had, they might have also noticed the strip of microfilm carefully concealed in the bottom left hand corner.**

**Before the agent returned to transport my papers to the incinerator, I hastily scribbled down a few elements of the formula from the microfilm before I hid it in the pile destined for destruction. I may have made a few  unfortunate errors in the transcription but Pierce and his predecessors only had themselves to blame for refusing my repeated requests for new spectacles as the eyesight of this old man continued to deteriorate with age.**

**So it was with a certain sense of satisfaction, that I saw history repeat itself.**

**Given the libraries of scientific genius the Nazis had incinerated to gain power, it seemed only fitting for me to rob HYDRA of their power to replicate the supersoldier serum, by consigning my own twisted science to the flames.**

**I presented Pierce with his precious formulae yesterday evening. I wish him well with it. I’m sure he’ll create many ‘Winter Soldiers’, but they’re not going to threaten anyone as single-celled organisms in test tubes; least of all you, my dearest. I used to be the one trying to make myself irreplaceable, but you’re the irreplaceable one now; at least for the next 38 years, until a certain someone can finally come and rescue you.**

_-*-_

**So now, here we are. My watch tells me it’s just before dawn on the day of my death. Not as if I’ve seen more than a few hours of daylight since I was brought down here.**

**And I know that I’ll never see the sun again.**

**Still, I guess this recording has solved my puzzle at least.  It’s taken me hours of storytelling to finally understand what I should have known from the start, but then I never had a great deal of common sense, did I? I wanted to know why I’d clung on to life so stubbornly all these years and now I know. It was to keep you safe for your Stevie, my dearest.**

**From my office chair, I can see your cryo tube quite clearly, but even though I can’t see your face through the frosted glass, I know that you’re in there, your veiled eyes cherishing the secret treasure of your true love with infinite patience …how many times before they open to see your Stevie standing beside you once more, beckoning you into his arms?**

**I just wish that I could have found a way to stay by your side until you were reunited with him again. Just a glimpse of you truly happy; to witness a sweet kiss between you both, before I drew my last breath…it would have been enough…**

**But perhaps that’s my punishment for helping torture hundreds of men, for imprisoning you all these years, for murdering my husband…for …‘putting him to sleep’.**

**Before this imminent dead line, I had intended to mete out my own particularly poetic justice for that crime. I’d created a chemical exit for myself; a deliberately crude euthanasia with veterinarian grade drugs like the ones Pankiewicz had given me for you, to put this sick old dog out of its misery.**

**But that would have been the coward’s way out, wouldn’t it? Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes wouldn’t have left this earth with a whimper, not with the fate of a loved one at stake.**

**What was it you said to me again, dearest?**

**_“I’m glad you’re keeping my pistol, it’s been specially modified for people with small hands.”_ **

**Well, we shall see, Sergeant Barnes. We shall see…**

The recording fell silent. Only the slight whirring from what would had been the mechanical spools turning over reassured Steve that the silence wasn’t permanent. Bucky looked stunned, his mind no doubt searching for the meaning behind Zola’s cryptic words. 

 

He didn’t have long to wait.

 

**“Zola.”**

**“Ah, Herr Pierce, so good of you to drop by to see me on my last day.”**

Pierce’s voice sounded angry. **“This isn’t your retirement party, Zola. I came about _this_.”**

Steve and Bucky heard the rustle of a sheaf of papers being shaken in the middle distance. Then, closer to the microphone, masked by the sound of Zola scrambling to his feet, they both detected the faint sliding sound of his desk drawer being stealthily opened.  Zola’s footsteps beyond the office died away but Steve and Bucky could still hear their exchange clearly enough.

 

**“Those are formulae you requested, Herr Pierce.”**

**“Only they’re not. To the untrained eye, they look authentic enough, but we’ve already had three failures at the test tube stage.”**

**“You mean to say you’ve had your people working on this overnight?”**

**“Let’s just say, I don’t entirely trust you, Zola.”**

**“Well then, it’s no wonder they failed; they’re tired. You work your scientists much too hard.”**

**“They do as I say. Scientists that cross me end up buried alive.”**

**“You have told me about that already, Herr Pierce. But for you to make good on that kind of threat, I can only assume the unfortunate scientist in question didn’t think to fight back?”**

**“Of course he didn’t fight back. How could a weak-willed, spineless…”**

 

The sudden ferocity of the explosion made Steve and Bucky jump. It was the kind of gratingly noisy discharge only a vintage weapon produced. Steve didn’t have to ask Bucky, he knew Zola had fired his pistol.

The shot rang out in echoing silence for the merest fraction of a second, before it was swallowed up by distant screaming, cursing, the thump of several pairs of boots echoing in the space beyond and the tell-tale burst of fire from a machine-gun.

A few seconds more, and they heard the dull thud of a heavy door being hastily drawn and slammed shut. Then Zola’s gasping, wheezing, fitfully dragging himself closer, ever closer to the Dictaphone, now accompanied by frenzied thudding against the door itself.

A faint whoosh of air, probably his moving the Dictaphone towards him, and then….

A peal of low, almost indulgent, laughter.

 

**Bang and clang all you like. You’ll never get in. Pierce insisted on that ‘asset proof’ door. Well, I’ll bet he’s regretting it now.**

His voice was raspy. Though he’d had to develop a high threshold for pain under HYDRA, Zola’s agonized tone betrayed him.

 

**I’m sorry, my dearest, I…I failed you. I never had to…to shoot anyone before, and I never got the chance to practice. I over-estimated the recoil and shot too low. Still…I’ve learned enough about being a father for you over the years to know that Pierce would have made a terrible father himself. At least I’ve spared a future generation the horror of his poor parenting skills.**

 

Steve saw his boyfriend’s look of puzzlement. “JARVIS pause the playback.”

“I’m getting confused,” Bucky admitted. “Zola said Pierce acted like a little kid before. Now he’s making jokes about his parenting skills? And if he shot low…does that mean he hit Pierce or missed him?”

Steve worried his bottom lip with his teeth for a moment. “JARVIS, can you access the findings from the autopsy of Alexander Pierce?”

“I’m afraid that information is classified, sir.”

“Could you get clearance?”

“You wish me to contact Mr. Stark?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

“His autopsy? But Zola didn’t kill Pierce,” Bucky protested. “He told us just now that he’d failed. And anyway, didn’t Fury kill Pierce?”

“I’m not interested in how Pierce died,” Steve said. “I’m interested in how he lived; or rather what he had to live without, to…”

“Mr. Stark doesn’t have that level of clearance either,” JARVIS interrupted. “So he took the liberty of hacking the file on your behalf.”

Bucky couldn’t disguise his amused snort, as the battle between Captain America’s Boy Scout morals and Steve Rogers’ joyful relief played out in the conflicting emotions scudding across his boyfriend’s face like clouds in a gale.

“Mr. Stark asked me to remind you once again that anything that is within his capacity to provide is happily granted in the pursuit of this investigation,” JARVIS continued. “Do you wish me to display the executive summary on your computer monitor or provide a verbal…”

“Just tell us if they found anything unusual about his physical appearance,” Steve cut in.

“Distinguishing marks?” JARVIS queried.

“In the...pelvic area,” Steve suggested.

“Ah!” The synthesized exclamation seemed almost real. “The autopsy records that the deceased had been subject to a radical inguinal orchiectomy.”

“In English, JARVIS,” Bucky grumbled.

“That is to say, extensive surgery to remove a damaged or diseased testicle,” JARVIS clarified. ”Later cosmetic surgery provided a realistic-looking implant which also helped to disguise extensive scar tissue from the original wound, but the autopsy revealed these underlying injuries.”

“A wound, you say? What kind of a wound?”

“A gunshot wound, Sergeant Barnes. The radius of the scar indicated the discharge of a .45 calibre ACP cartridge at near point-blank range. There's some speculation in the appended notes as to why any assailant would have chosen to target such a non-vital area of the body, but no firm conclusion was possible beyond determining that this was unlikely to have been the work of a professional assassin.”

“Well, they got that part right,” Bucky snorted. “It ain’t likely the Winter Soldier ever went to town on a guy’s nuts…” he paused to roll his eyes at the brief flutter of lewd amusement on Steve’s face. “…but I might have made an exception if Pierce had been my target.”

“I guess Pierce could still have had kids if he’d wanted,” Steve shrugged. “Zola only managed to hit one of them, though no-one could have known that at the time.”

“The important thing is that Zola shot Pierce somewhere that would have really hurt his pride,” Bucky concluded. “And I can’t think of a better use for my pistol than half-castrating that HYDRA bastard.”

 “Was there anything else, sir?” JARVIS drawled in a slightly offended tone, Steve thought, with a snigger. He assumed JARVIS must have been used to Stark cursing like a trooper when things went wrong in the lab, but perhaps the prissy computer’s artificial intelligence didn’t expect it of the boys.

“No, thank you,” Steve replied with immaculate politeness. “Just continue playing the recording please?”

After a few seconds of heavy breathing, a groan of pain from the Dictaphone made Steve gulp.

 

**I need to get rid of this tape before they find it. If I can…if I can get back…to the door, they might not bother searching down here. I’ve got to make sure no-one ever hears these words. My part in this affair must never be known. I…can’t let them take me alive; not now. My life wouldn’t be worth living; not after what I’ve done.**

**Now, what was it you said about lesson one, my dearest?**

**_“Just put the muzzle in your mouth and squeeze the trigger.”_ **

 

Bucky eyes widened in horror, hearing his wisecrack being quoted right back at him. “Steve… I didn’t…I…I never wanted him to…”

“I know you didn’t, Buck,” Steve assured him gently. “Zola knew that too, he was just…”

Bucky anxiously addressed the air, where Zola’s dying voice was floundering. “Herr Doctor, No!” he cried out. “I’m…I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. I…I didn’t mean for you to _do_ that. _Please_ …”

Steve’s heart ached to see the sudden anguish on his boyfriend’s face. Bucky was smart. He knew this sad story was turning full circle back to the beginning of the mystery. He knew what was coming; the pistol, the skeleton, the bullet-hole in the back of the skull. There was nothing Bucky could do to turn back the wheels of time; to prevent the tragedy steadily unfolding before him, the horror hidden for decades within the walls of the sub-basement.

But that didn’t stop Bucky feeling the pain of losing someone who he’d learned to know and love over the past few days. A man who’d tenderly cared for him like a father even though Bucky had barely even known it at the time. Zola had loved and missed his own father very deeply, and now Bucky found himself working through the same feelings of grief and regret, knowing he’d never be able to thank or repay that old man for all the years of loving kindness he’d shown.

 

**If memory serves, Schmidt advised me not to make any pretty speeches. Well now, my dearest, there’s precious little time for that.  I’m running out of words nearly as fast as…as I’m running out of blood.**

Steve’s mind raced back to the broad trail of dried blood in Zola’s office, together with the rattle of the machine-gun they’d heard less than a minute ago. Zola’s remains betrayed no obvious machine-gun injuries, but unless any of those high velocity rounds had actually struck bone, they’d have passed right through his body without leaving so much as a scratch.

 

**They say you watch your life flash in front of your eyes before you die. I do hope that’s sentimental nonsense because I’ve no desire to re-live it beyond what I’ve done already for the tape. And the story of my life wasn’t pretty, was it? But now I understand it had a good purpose in the end. It’s been an honor looking after you the way my father looked after me. And though I could never give you the life you truly deserved, at least now I can see I was still capable or love, and care. And that means you were right, my dearest. You were right all along about me. I…I was never… really… a monster.”**

 

Tears rolled down Bucky’s cheeks. “You were never a monster, Herr Doctor,” he sobbed. “You hear me? Never!”

 

**It grieves me so much to leave you now, but I cannot take you with me. Where I go, you cannot follow. This escape plan is for me alone. Please know that I tried to do everything I could to keep you safe for the man that you love...**

When Zola gave a sharp cry of pain, Steve and Bucky flinched along with him.

 

**…and yes, with my last breath, I, Zola, confess that I love you too, Bucky my…my dearest son. I want to see you happy.**

**So you go find your Stevie and never let him go, do you hear me? Once you’re free of this…this nightmare, you have the time of your life with him and don’t look back, my dearest. Don’t…ever…look back…**

Steve and Bucky flinched one last time, but not in response to a jarring gunshot or an anguished cry. This time, it was to the sound of a simple conclusive ‘click’. Zola’s faltering fingers had found the Dictaphone’s stop button.

 

The story, like the tape recording, was over.

 

All that remained was an eerie silence, leaden with meaning. Steve could picture the scene, as the dying old man ripped the innards out the Dictaphone tape, dumped it in the wastepaper basket and dragged himself back to his office door, as it steadily buckled under the impact of the guards' frantic attempts to reach him.

Zola had used Bucky’s pistol to humiliate Pierce, and while he still had breath, he could use it to defy HYDRA one last time.  As he pressed the cold muzzle against the roof of his mouth, had Zola’s dying thoughts settled on his loving father, his late husband, or the soldier who’d become his dearest son?

Steve would never know the answer.

With that final squeeze of the trigger, Zola had exchanged captivity for eternity.

 

-*-

 

Steve put his arm around his boyfriend as Bucky wept his grief into Steve’s chest. Now that they’d reached the end, Steve felt like such an idiot. At the start of this mystery, he’d read the signs, but drawn the conclusions furthest from the truth.

Neither Pierce nor his squads of henchmen had killed Dr. Arnim Zola, much less their weapon of choice, the feared Winter Soldier. Bucky hadn’t even been awake to see the little old man who’d watched over him for all those years, calmly execute himself with Sergeant J.B. Barnes’s infantry pistol.

At least Steve now knew for certain that during his quest to find the meaning behind Fury’s memory stick, he’d merely destroyed a computerized imitation of Zola, triggered to deliver its history lesson when its cameras detected his presence in the control room. The real Dr. Zola had ultimately denied his mind to HYDRA, and answered them with a defiance so painful - literally painful for Pierce - that the HYDRA leader had childishly insisted on carrying out his now empty threat to bury the scientist alive by sealing off both his office and his memory with a wall mortared in the old man’s blood.

But the seeds Zola had carefully planted remained undisturbed.

The hidden genius of his computer virus algorithm ticked steadily down year after year, decade after decade, until it could safely reveal Steve’s whereabouts to Colonel Fury and ultimately bring him back to Bucky.

The broken tape lay forgotten in the depths of its rusting wastepaper basket, until Steve himself could reclaim it, and fathom its secrets.

Nor was that the only relic left to retrieve from the rotting carcass of Zola’s office.

While Bucky had been with Tony, Steve had carefully cleaned up the two surviving objects he’d discovered on the bookcase, leaving them aside until the tape had run its course.

Zola’s recording had revealed the last of its secrets. But his room had not.

And now was the time to share them.

“These are for you,” Steve said. “Two items from his office that I know ‘Herr Doctor’ would have wanted you to have.”

Steve slipped the book from his pocket onto the coffee table in front of them. Although the title page proved unfathomable - neither of them could read Polish - one word stood out. The name of a famous artist, and the first word Zola recognized from the lips of his future husband in a beautiful old Swedish library long, long ago. As he turned the pages of Michelangelo art plates over in his hands, Bucky’s memory of his day in Sopot burst back to life: rummaging through the shelves of that tatty little bookstore, triggering joyful memories of his artist boyfriend for the first time in years, and wandering arm in arm down the seaside pier with a sentimental old man.

“Who am I?” Bucky repeated, the half-forgotten musk of earthy beetroot soup stinging in his nostrils.

“You’re my boyfriend, Buck,” Steve said. “And we’re together again, just like Zola promised. Together the way he and Einar were when they were still young and in love.”

Steve placed the last object from Zola’s office into the palm of Bucky’s hand. It was a tiny photograph frame, its silvered filigree dulled and discolored at the edges, the glass still grimy in the corners from decades of dust.

“I wasn’t able to clean it up as well as I’d hoped,” Steve conceded, “And a little something came loose from the frame.”

He handed Bucky a withered sprig of Edelweiss.

Tears welled in Bucky’s eyes as he scented faint floral perfume from the remnant of Zola’s bridal posy. Peering into the past, the grainy monochrome image of two young men smiled back at Bucky; one tall, blond and muscular, with a mischievous grin that reminded him so much of Steve he could cry; the other plump, bespectacled, bashful, his bow tie askew at a jaunty angle that implied the couple had shared a passionate kiss before the photograph was taken. Holding hands together and gazing into each other’s eyes, they proudly displayed the gold wedding rings that Zola would later give away to ease Bucky’s pain and help to bring him to this very moment, reunited with Steve.

Bucky smiled through his tears. “It took him over forty years, but he finally did it, didn’t he Stevie?”

Steve pulled his boyfriend into a tight embrace. “He sure did, Buck. And we won’t ever be parted again.”

As Bucky snuggled up against him, Steve’s eyes settled back on the photograph. The old man had more than fulfilled his promise to them, but the overgrown Boy Scout in Steve itched with ingratitude. All Zola wanted was to see the two of them reunited, but in doing so, he’d been estranged forever from everything he ever loved; the husband who’d betrayed him, and the father he would never see again.

For decades, Zola’s little body had lain abandoned and forgotten.  After this investigation was over, would his skeleton forever languish in the depths of some soulless forensic laboratory, or - worse still - become the centerpiece of a freak show from the vaults of HYDRA, exposed before the paying public in a glass display case?

“Did Stark really say he’d help us any way he could if we asked him, Buck?” he murmured into his boyfriend’s hair.

“Sure he did. Why? What do you have in mind?”

Steve pulled back from Bucky with a sly grin. “You’ll see.”

 


	12. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fathers and sons...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading this story. I hope you've found it interesting and original. It's been my pleasure writing it for you. And finally, my immense gratitude to my magnificent Beta Diamond Raven for all of her help. I couldn't have done it without you!

 

__  
****Grindelwald, Switzerland. Present day****  


 

“I don’t suppose you realize how lucky we’ve been, Herr Rogers?”

“In what way?” Steve asked

“Well, our laws clearly state that a grave must be dug up after 25 years.  Switzerland is a small country,” he explained. “We must make room for the living.”

“So, what happened to Dr. Zola’s father?” Bucky asked anxiously.

The young priest pointed out a footnote in faded copperplate handwriting beneath the neatly typed register of burials.

“Incredibly, Herr Zola seems to have arranged a special covenant granting this burial plot to his family in perpetuity, even though he had no surviving family.”

“But that’s just not true. He did have family,” Bucky exclaimed.

“We know that now,” the priest agreed. “But according to these records, the authorities had officially declared his son as missing.”

“Presumed dead?” Steve queried.

The priest nodded his assent. “It was an all-too common occurrence at the time. We may have been a neutral country, but if you had the misfortune to be outside the Swiss border when war was declared, then you had to find your own way home, and hundreds of our people died in the attempt.”

Bucky thought back to Zola’s own tragic story. Einar’s words had left Zola fearful to go home, but ultimately he’d exiled himself to protect and cherish the son he’d never had, his ‘dearest’ Bucky.

“But if hundreds of Swiss citizens went missing, surely that means there’d be hundreds of these graves still open?” Steve suggested.

The priest shook his head sadly. “Most people simply gave up hope in the years after the war when their relatives didn’t come home. But I spoke to some of our older parishioners, and it seems Herr Zola was absolutely convinced that his son would return to him someday. He insisted on paying the extortionate fee required to secure a covenant preserving his rights on this grave until that day finally came.”

Bucky’s eyes brimmed with tears, as Steve slid an arm around Bucky’s waist. Zola’s love for his father had not been misplaced. Herr Zola never doubted the love of his son for a moment, just as Bucky no longer doubted Zola’s tender care for him, borne out of that same fatherly love.

“We received the casket express delivery from Stark Industries last week,” the priest continued. “Dr. Zola’s remains were reburied with his father, honoring all the Christian traditions of his generation, and the entire church congregation attended to pay their respects. We followed your instructions with the gravestone, and our parishioners will ensure that it’s kept clean and tidy. He was one of us, after all. Do you wish to see?”

“Yes please,” said Bucky.

That’s what they’d come for, after all.

Pausing to place a pocketful of coins on the collection plate, Bucky glanced up to notice Steve squinting in the bright sunshine as he followed the priest through the rear door of Friedhof Reformed church. Hurrying along to join them, Bucky shielded his own eyes with his hand and focused on the ground for a few moments until his vision adjusted to the intense glare from the sun’s rays.

Then his eyes rose…

…and his jaw fell.

Row after row of immaculate light grey gravestones; some smooth, others more rugged in texture, each at the head of a riot of colorful alpine bedding plants, stood as foreground to the magnificent backcloth of the snow-capped Bernese mountains. A swathe of lush green conifers, punctuated by the occasional traditional Swiss chalet, led the eye back towards the intimate little churchyard.

“It…it’s beautiful,” gasped Bucky. 

The priest allowed himself a modest smile. “Many people say it’s the most beautiful cemetery in the world. Come, I’ll take you to him.”

They didn’t have to walk far. The first grave down the center row had a large wooden cross. The priest halted and pointed to the little rough-hewn pointed gravestone beside it, a miniature of the alpine summit guarding the churchyard, replete with summer flowers blooming in bright gold, delicate pink and deepest crimson.

“I’ll leave you two in peace now.”

Bucky heard the priest’s footsteps crunching back along the gravel path, as he glanced below the existing weathered lettering commemorating Zola’s father, to read the fresh inscription carved onto the gravestone.

 

**_In loving memory of Dr. Arnim Zola_ **

**_1903-1973_ **

**_With love and thanks, my dearest._ **

 

He felt Steve’s hand grasp his own.

Steve turned to him, “Do you think he’d have approved?”

“I’m sure of it, Stevie,” Bucky said. “All he ever wanted was to be loved and needed again. I sure needed him when HYDRA were holding us captive all those years. He never once let me down. And you know, now we’ve heard his story from his own lips, I think we both love him more than a little too.”

He turned back to Zola’s gravestone. “Herr Doctor, I love you like a father, and I’m so grateful to you for protecting me, and for bringing my Stevie back home to me.”

Steve pressed a kiss to Bucky’s lips, in full view of the grave.

“That was for you, Dr. Zola,” Steve said, exchanging a cheeky smile with Bucky.

For several moments after, the boys stared silently at the little grave.

Steve sighed and turned to his boyfriend. “Have you decided, Buck?”

“Yeah, I have Stevie, and I’m…I’m gonna say it.”

“You sure? I know it’s not your style.”

“Maybe not, but just this once…for him, I’ll make an exception.”

“That’s real sweet of you,” Steve smiled.

Bucky returned the smile, releasing his hand from Steve’s grasp to retrieve a fresh posy of Edelweiss from his top pocket. Leaning over the colorful shrubs, he slid the bouquet of pure white blossom up against the stone of the man who had given his life to protect him.

“Goodbye Herr Doctor,” Bucky whispered hoarsely, swallowing down his tears, before concluding, “…and thank you again… _my dearest_.”

Bucky glanced up from the graveside to see Steve silhouetted against the majestic backdrop of the glistening snow-peaked mountains, a prism of refracted sunbeams casting a golden halo around him. Bucky felt so blessed to have Steve as his boyfriend, to have his supportive presence this day of all days. Zola had kept his solemn promise to find Steve, and Bucky had never felt more grateful to him.  For a fleeting moment, he had the strangest feeling that Steve wasn’t alone; that the little Swiss doctor was standing there beside him in the afterglow and smiling his benediction on them both.

Perhaps it was just the emotion of the occasion, but Zola’s brief presence, if that’s what it had been, could not have been more immaculately well timed. To Bucky’s thinking, a fresh breath of bracing Alpine breeze echoed momentarily with the sibilance of the old man’s wistful sigh, just as Steve took a step back from the grave. Steve’s furtive attempt to run his hand behind the inside flap of his leather jacket wasn’t exactly subtle, and his expression shifting from panic to relief in a split second confirmed everything Bucky had suspected.  To him, Zola’s sigh was a final fatherly pat on the back, congratulating his smart son.

And Bucky was smart. Smart enough to have heard Steve asking the priest, using his trademark stage whisper, to bless those two gold wedding bands he’d been hiding in the dark secrecy of his coat pocket since they’d left New York. Steve had been compulsively checking they were still safely hidden there every few hours, and Bucky intended to tell his fiancé-to-be that he’d figured all this out once Steve finally got around to his proposal.

But right now, Bucky felt sure he could walk away from Dr. Zola’s final resting place arm-in-arm with his future husband, safe in the knowledge that the man who had loved him like a father, would be just as proud as any father could be to see his son wearing a wedding ring.

 

The end.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  
> 
> Friedhof Grindelwald churchyard: Dr. Arnim Zola finally comes home.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [He lives to run](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16384382) by [Builder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Builder/pseuds/Builder)




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